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myxsweetxeverything · 1 year ago

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"The Lights in the Sky" Chapter 3 - "After School"

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Summary: A white van at the boutique, a talk over ice cream, and headaches.

Author's Note: Sorry for how long this took. Also apologize that this chapter is mainly character and plot set up - but I promise things are going to get weirder.

As per the last chapter's edit, this and the previous chapter now take place on June 3rd (again, keep track of dates, would be writers - don't be like me).

June 3rd, 1994 4:52 Lulu's Boutique

Lavender Creek had - on a good day - a population of around three thousand. If someone somehow had the desire to visit, they would have to drive two and a half hours south of Portland, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Greeting you upon arrival were ruins of locally owned businesses closed down by Walmart, the great carcasses of the steel plant and textile factory, and the number one destination of any Friday night - the Dairy Queen. On the outskirts of town, you'd find the Lavender Creek Dairy Plant, which in the last ten years had been plagued by issue after issue.

That wasn't getting into the seedier parts of town. The patches of cheap bars with cheaper booze, a gun shop run by someone convinced doomsday would happen at any moment, and a pair of gas stations with pale and twitchy men hanging around back trying to make a quick buck with questionable substances.

It was nothing but a dead end of a town. In the mind of a thirteen-year-old fashion-crazy girl like Mariqueen, the worst part was that the only place around to buy anything resembling cute clothes was Lulu's Boutique.

At the front desk, keeping a disinterested eye on would-be shoplifters, was gray-haired Lulu herself. Supposedly she had been the town beauty queen in her youth (“I was this close to becoming Miss Oregon - then I would have been Miss USA,” she once claimed unprompted to Mariqueen), and she had opened the shop after her attempted acting career floundered. The ‘boutique’ had its walls covered in flowery paper that hadn’t been in style in almost 40 years, but Lulu had grown too attached to the hideous patterns of dusty roses. Even though smoking had not been allowed in the shop for several years, everything down to the carpet still smelled of a mix of tobacco and Eau de Toilette. The clothes in the boutique were more often than not two years out of date, squashing Mariqueen and her friend’s desire to match the latest trend that the magazines talked about.

Lori's twenty-six-year-old stepmother stood boredly near the magazine rack, tapping her freshly manicured nails against her thigh. She shot a glare at the girls here and there; when she saw that they weren't getting in trouble, she went back to staring at photos of Hollywood couples. Throughout the boutique, the four girls ran around and blabbered about the season's hottest colors, what would attract boys the most, and if those adorable high heels they couldn't possibly walk around in or afford came in their sizes.

"Do you think I can get this in blue?"

"Lori, you always look bad in blue. Yellow is your color anyway."

"You know I hate yellow! And what about that blue dress I wore to the spring dance? You said I looked amazing in it!"

"I lied."

"You're so mean, Chrissy."

"Only because I'm right and you know it."

To say that Mariqueen hadn't been paying attention to her friends' ramblings would be an understatement. Usually all too willing to join in with their fashion talk, something else had caught her eye. It wasn't a dress, a pair of shoes, or a piece of sparkling jewelry. Of all things, it was a white van parked on the curb in front of the shop.

A dirty white van in desperate need of a carwash, but still. Why it caught her eye not even she knew - white vans were a dime a dozen, even in Lavender Creek. The only thing she knew was that she had never seen a white van parked in front of Lulu's before. There were no business logos on the side, which made it even harder to figure out why it was there at all.

Mariqueen moved closer to get a better view out the window, failing to look the least bit subtle about it ("Why is she being weird?" Melissa muttered before heading to the dressing room). With her face practically pressed against the glass, she caught sight of the driver's seat. Barely visible through the tinted glass was a tall, thin figure sitting still. Their head stared forward; Mariqueen glanced at the front of the van, but if anything was interesting going on over there, she must have missed it.

She looked back at the figure.

Their head turned. The hairs on Mariqueen's neck stood straight.

Somehow, she knew they were now staring right at her.

Mariqueen froze.

"Hello? Earth to Q, are you there? Looks like she's shut up for once…"

"Show her the perfume, she'll love it."

A thick, musky stench shoved its way into Mariqueen's nose.

"Hey!" Mariqueen shouted. With a grimace, she pushed away the source - Chrissy's perfume-drenched wrist. "Ich, what is that? Are you trying to suffocate me?"

Chrissy pouted at her. "It's the same perfume my cousin Amy uses, and she says all the boys in Seattle go crazy when she wears it." She shook her head. "You know Q, we looked all over for you after school and we brought you with us, the least you can do is be nice."

"And what were you even doing with that ugly Reznor kid anyway?" Lori piped in. "He and his friends are a bunch of weirdos, everyone knows that."

An engine came alive outside the shop. When Mariqueen turned her attention back on the window, it was too late - the van had already made its getaway. And despite its absence, Mariqueen didn't feel any more relieved

Instead, she felt a desperate need to talk. About what, she didn't know. She looked around the shop in search of anything that would spark a conversation before settling on the sunglasses rack next to her. The rack stood like a tall creature made of mirrored eyes, each one reflecting her barely-hidden panic.

"Do you think this-" Mariqueen grabbed a pair of tangerine-orange framed sunglasses, "-will go with my new swimsuit?" She hastily placed the sunglasses over her eyes. She grinned at her reflection, but even she knew how fake the expression was; an actress she was not.

Behind her, Lori said, "Orange is a terrible color, Q."

"And what do you know about color?" Mariqueen asked, extending the 'you' in a mock snobby tone.

"I don't think you are allowed to judge anyone," Lori snapped and took a pair of tortoise-shell framed glasses.

Putting the glasses back on the rack, Mariqueen shot Lori a glare. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Emerging from the dressing room, Melissa pranced across the boutique's plush carpet. Her sundress, yellow with subtle butterfly patterns, reached just past her knee. "You know what she's talking about."

"No, I don't."

"God, Q…" Lori picked up a bottle of shocking pink nail polish, eying it. "You're so clueless sometimes, you know that?"

Melissa tsk'd. "What do you expect from her?"

"Girls, have you picked out what you want yet?" Lori's stepmom walked over in between the girls, interrupting the argument that was surely about to erupt. "I don't have all day."

Melissa threw her hands up in protest. "I'm not done trying out clothes!"

"Do I look like I care?"

All four girls sighed. Melissa begrudgingly went back to the dressing room, while Chrissy and Lori picked out their respective perfume and nail polish. For Mariqueen, who had barely been looking at the merchandise since laying eyes on the white van, the decision of what to get was much more difficult. She had a decent amount of allowance saved up, but it wasn't nearly enough to buy anything she did want.

Her eyes wandered until she saw the turning jewelry display on the front counter. Lulu had gotten bored making sure they weren't stealing anything, as her nose was between a paperback romance novel. She didn't raise her eyes while Mariqueen approached the desk. Hanging from the display, shining and glittering under the fluorescent lights, was an elaborately-designed heart pendant attached to a silvery necklace. She moved in closer and looked at the price tag.

It was the exact amount of money she had saved up.

She picked it up from the display, grinning. "I know what I'm getting!"

5:01 PM The Dairy Queen on 5th and Walker

It was in between spoonfuls of cheap ice cream that Robin asked him the question. "How did you get away from Mr. Roberts anyway?"

Four of them were sitting on the sidewalk with their cones in hand. The Dairy Queen was near the edge of town, passed the abandoned textiles factory, where the trees became greater in number and provided ample shade from the early summer sun. Danny had wolfed down his Blizzard in record time, got a brain freeze, and was hanging and spinning by one hand around a nearby street lamp. Richard was trying to get a peanut out of his braces with his tongue from his peanut butter cup Blizzard, and Tori sat silently watching Danny while eating her strawberry sundae.

With a mouth full of ice cream, Trent froze. He swallowed hard. "What?"

"How did you get away from Mr. Roberts?" Robin repeated. "No way you just ran."

Richard excitedly piped up, "Yeah! Did you kick him in the balls or something?"

"No! But I wanted to." Trent shook his head.

"Then how did you get away?" Tori asked. "You're so…tiny compared to him."

Trent sneered at her. Why was she always treating him like he was so fragile? "No I'm not! I got away because-"

The image was all too fresh in Trent’s mind, and he still had no idea how to attempt to process it. The memory flashed in his head - the hand letting him go suddenly. Mr. Roberts staring wide-eyed in shock. The way the hand was suspended as if an invisible puppet master was holding it still.

The throbbing in Trent's head was back in full force. Each breath he drew made his brain react with another burst of pulsating pain. The sunlight, even with the shade, didn't help matters. He could almost excuse it as an intense brain freeze, but this hurt more than any brain freeze he ever had.

Trent stared back at the remainder of his chocolate-dipped cone and frowned, his appetite gone. "He let me go. I guess."

Tori looked at him worryingly.

"If I -" Danny let go of the street lamp, but continued spinning in his sugar high. "If I were you I woulda kicked him in the balls. And give him the finger." He stopped spinning, but couldn't keep his feet from stumbling or his head still. "And then I'd tell him to-" Danny's face turned a sickly green. "Oh fuck…"

No one turned around as Danny stammered over to the nearby garbage can and dry heaved. The grip on Trent's sugar cone loosened. He was starting to feel ill himself - and he hadn't even been spinning.

Pain pulsed through his head again.

"I wanna go home," He muttered. "Mr. Roberts probably called my grandma and told him what happened. She's probably wondering where I am."

Next to him, Tori rested her arm on his shoulder. "Worried she's gonna be upset?"

"It's not that. I just-" He stuttered. Tori gave him an incredulous look (her "mom" face, he called it), and his face flushed. "Okay, yeah, I am. Not that much though."

"Hey, at least you didn't spray paint a teacher's car like we did!" Shouted Danny, still face down towards the trash can. "Tell her that, it'll put shit in perspective."

"And then get us in trouble?" Richard protested.

"Yeah, about that, I still have no idea how you talked me into that," Said Tori. "I lose several IQ points when I'm around you guys, I swear…"

"Because you're the minister's daughter," Said Robin, who had just bitten off the last of his Dilly Bar and was twirling the stick between his fingers. "And who'd ever suspect her when she plays piano at every church function?"

Tori gave Robin a silent but coy look, then went back to playing with her strawberry sundae.

"Dude, are you even puking anymore?" Robin asked. He craned his neck to see Danny's head still facing the trash can.

"Nah. Didn't even puke, nothing came out."

"...then what are you still doing over there?"

"Come here, I'll show ya…"

As Robin stood up and walked towards the trash can, Tori rolled her eyes. "Anyway, listen, she's not gonna be that upset with you. She and your grandpa will probably just talk with you and leave it at that."

"Yeah, but…"

"But 'what'?"

"...never mind. I'm going home." Trent grabbed his backpack with his free hand and stood.

"I'll come with you!" Richard chimed, oblivious to Trent's dour mood. "I don't think I wanna be around Robin for a while anyway."

Mere feet away, Trent caught the sight of Danny forcing Robin's head into the all-too-full trash can. A muffled "Asshole!" emanated from inside the can as flies flew around in a frenzy. Danny laughed maniacally, even while Robin fruitlessly tried to kick him. Tori suppressed a gag from her spot on the sidewalk, while the only thing Trent suppressed was a laugh at Robin's expense.

"...You know, I do have a curfew tonight, so I should probably get going…" She looked up at Trent. "Are you gonna be alright? With your grandparents, I mean?"

Trent shrugged. "Yeah, I guess." He tried not to imagine his grandmother, all sad and disappointed, as he and Richard walked away.

5:50 PM

"Hey, Trent?"

"Yeah?"

"So, I overheard my parents talking earlier." Richard fidgeted with the straps of his backpack, while his steps developed a spring. "And we might go visit Robert in LA in July, and I was thinking about asking them if you, you know, wanted to come with us?"

"Um, I'm gonna have to think about it. Ummmm, I might be-"

Catching a brief glimpse of Richard's excited and waiting face, Trent felt like an idiot when he realized what he was saying - Richard wasn't asking him if he wanted to do a run-of-the-mill sleepover. He was getting another chance to leave town.

What was Trent even saying? What 'might' he be doing this summer anyway? At most, his grandparents might drag him to some crappy tent on Mt. Hood. It wasn't like he was visiting his mom and sister either - Tera was spending the next six weeks at camp, and his mom was too busy working.

But Los Angeles would be cool. It would be way different than Lavender Creek. Different and better. And Richard's brother, one of the lucky ones who managed to escape town, became a movie star - he lost count of the times Richard dragged them all to see Terminator 2 when it came out.

It could be fun. It would be fun.

"Um, yeah, I'd like to go." He kept his tone calm, trying not to sound like an overly excited loser. "I have to um, check with my grandparents first."

Richard broke into a grin. "Yeah! I'll ask my mom. It'll be the best vacation ever!"

Trent nodded half-heartedly. He saw the familiar sight of the Patricks' house coming closer with every step. The family car sat in the driveway, but Trent couldn't spot any sign of life in the front yard or through the windows. Countless hours had been spent in the front and back yards, and despite not living there Trent knew that house like the back of his hand.

The front door opened, revealing a very displeased Mrs. Patrick. She crossed her arms. "Where have you been, young man?"

Richard sighed and visibly resisted the urge to roll his eyes. They were mere feet from the front lawn now, freshly cut by one of his older siblings. "I was hanging out with my friends, Mom!"

She shook her head. "Get inside and help me set the table."

The two of them reached the mailbox, and Richard looked at Trent, then at his mother. "Hey, Mom? So, Trent and I were talking, and, um, could he come with us to see Robert?"

Mrs. Patrick tightened her lips. "I'm sorry, honey, but your father and I…We've agreed to keep this a family vacation. Lord knows it's hectic just getting all seven of us under control for a vacation." She looked at Trent, still standing on the sidewalk with a newly crestfallen face. "Trent, dear, would you like to join us for dinner? It's casserole night, you like casseroles don't you?"

"Um, no thank you, Mrs. Patrick," Trent said dully. "I…I have plans with my grandparents."

Richard gave him a sheepish look. "Sorry, Trent."

"It's fine, whatever." Trent shrugged, but his muscles were stiff.

"Guess I'll see you later, man."

Trent nodded and went silent as Richard sprinted up the front porch, with his mom nagging him about something Trent couldn't make out. When the door closed, making mother and son invisible, Trent sighed and started his trek home. It wasn't a long walk, ten minutes if he walked fast enough. Just in time for his grandpa to get home from work.

He took one last look at the Patricks' house as he passed by the edge of their yard. It made him think of the day when he started kindergarten, and during recess, Richard had asked him if he wanted to play pretend. Trent said yes because he had just moved there and didn't know anyone. And then it turned out his grandparents didn't live too far from Richard's family, and his grandmother was quick to arrange a playdate between the two of them.

A seemingly endless amount of days had passed in that yard. A seemingly endless amount of days had passed in that street, in that neighborhood…

In all of Lavender Creek.

A frown crept over his face. He hadn’t always lived in Lavender Creek, but it sure as hell felt like it did. After he was born, he and his parents moved to Portland and lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Trent didn’t understand why they divorced, but he understood his mother’s reasoning for sending him to his grandparents even less. Why couldn’t he have stayed in Portland like his dad did? Like his mom and sister did? Why was he thrown out into the middle of nowhere? He loved his grandparents more than anyone else in the world, but did they have to live in a nothing town where the most exciting thing to happen was a bank robbery from when he was eight?

He was tired of Lavender Creek, absolutely sick of it. Seeing the same faces, the places, in and out every day made him want to puke sometimes. And his chance of getting out of Oregon just flew by just as he found out about it. It was like he was trapped in the same boring town until he died.

If he can't leave, why couldn't something just happen once? Just once he’d like something more to happen around there. Something interesting. Something he's never experienced before.

The wind rustled the bushes as he walked, his destination getting nearer. The sound of an engine caught his attention and he turned around. His heart sank with dread as he saw his grandparents’ worn-out station wagon slow down and pull over.

In the driver seat, his grandfather rolled down the window. Mr. Clark smiled at him. “Hey there, young man. Why the long face?”

Trent paled and looked down at his feet. “...I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Did it have to do with that call I got from the football coach at your school?"

No reply came.

"Why don't you come on in and we'll talk it out with Grandma when we get home? Sound like a plan?"

Before he could begrudgingly nod, a burst of pain struck Trent’s head.

Everything went black, with the only sound being Trent's grandfather yelling his name.

6:47 PM Ross Residence

"You have to see the plans, you really do. The mayor will have no choice but to agree to the proposal!" Uncle Marcus took another swig of his wine. "Iris honey, you think so, right? What am I saying? Of course, you do!"

Aunt Iris gave a reluctant nod as if even she was skeptical of her husband's ideas. Mr. and Mrs. Ross gave Uncle Marcus unsure looks, which they had kept for the entirety of the rather one-sided conversation. For their part, Atticus and his siblings paid zero attention to the extended business-related rant that their new uncle just gave at the dinner table. Atticus had barely looked up from the pile of vegetables that he poked repeatedly with his fork.

Mr. Ross sat his water glass down on the table. "That's…quite the project you have, Marcus."

Mrs. Ross was more direct. "This isn't going to work."

"Now don't say that!" Uncle Marcus exclaimed. "A mall is just what Lavender Creek's economy needs. And everyone will love it and want to go there! It'll be the crown jewel of the town" His eyes hovered over the Ross children, each one looking more bored than the last. His gaze settled on Atticus. "Hey kiddo, how's it hanging?"

Atticus felt a sense of dread coming on that he was powerless to stop. Holding in an annoyed sigh, he said, "Um, it's- yes?"

Uncle Marcus grinned. "Good! I have a question for you, and I'm sure that makes you feel special. A question just for hip, cool kids like you." Atticus hoped he didn't see him cringe at that. "Malls: like 'em, or love 'em?"

Atticus was paralyzed - mostly by embarrassment. He nervously looked to his mother, who stared at Uncle Marcus with bemusement.

"You're probably thinking, 'Why does an old man like him care about my opinion?' I just happen to think you're a cool kid, Alan."

"M-my name is Atticus."

"That's what I said, but anyway-" Just as Atticus stood up from his chair, Uncle Marcus put his hand up in a 'stop' gesture. "Wait right there, kiddo, you never did answer my question." Atticus slowly sat back down. "And why do you like malls so much? Go into as much detail as you want, don't be shy!"

"Um, I don't go to malls…"

"How can you not like malls? Oh, I get it, you're in that 'everything sucks' phase that all teens go through."

As everyone else started to gather their dishes and leave the dining room table, Atticus became more annoyed by him. If Uncle Marcus didn't speed this up, Leopold would get to the computer before he did. "I just don't like them much. I don't like shopping."

"Well I'm just gonna have to change your mind, aren't I? So, I was thinking of adding an ice rink right in the center of…"

Atticus never wanted someone to shut up so badly in his life. When he overheard Leopold telling their mother he was going on the computer, he wanted to scream.

7:04 PM Clark Residence

When he came to, his vision just barely made out the two dark, gray outlines above him. Quickly, they developed more features, becoming more human as his eyelids fluttered like butterflies.

"Oh thank God, he's awake!"

Trent looked up at his grandma's concerned face and in a hoarse voice, said, "I'm sorry I escaped detention."

A sad smile crossed Mrs. Clark's face. "Oh honey, what are you talking about?"

"I-"

"Shh…" Next to Mrs. Clark, Mr. Clark held up a tall glass of ice water to Trent's view. "We'll talk about it tomorrow when you're feeling better, alright?"

Almost too weak to nod, Trent somehow managed to pick up the glass and put it to his dry lips. The speed at which he downed it would have earned him the envy of any hard-partying frat boy, and when he finished Mr. Clark took the glass back. His grandmother brushed his hair back gently, and it made him realize how sweaty his forehead was.

"How's your head?" She asked him.

He shrugged. "I guess it's okay."

"We'll let you get some more sleep and we'll talk in the morning, okay?"

His eyelids growing heavy, Trent whispered, "Okay…"

By the time they turned off the lamp on his nightstand, he had already fallen back to sleep. Mr. and Mrs. Clark exchanged worried looks at each other, then at their grandson. Despite how sound asleep he was in his bed, Trent's face was just as scrunched up as it was when he was awake and barely holding up his glass. His breaths were slow, but shaky. The blanket was warm and thick, but his small body still shivered.

Silently, they both hoped he would be better by morning.

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11:59 PM

Thick, velvety darkness covered Lavender Creek like a blanket on a child's bed. Even the few remaining stragglers in the waking world - blue-collar workers in bars, bored teens with nothing to do - would soon become transfixed by sleep's spell. Each bedroom window light would soon be switched off one by one, plunging the town further into darkness.

None of it would last. Not the peaceful sleep. Not the directionless nightly activities. Not the familiar but comforting darkness. Not the idea of a normal, carefree summer vacation.

Because with a burst of light coming from the sky, it all came to a horrible, violent end.

#nine inch nails fic #nin fic #fanfic: the lights in the sky #trent reznor fanfiction #my fanfiction #my works #cw: rpf #rpf safe

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tilbageidanmark · 10 months ago

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Movies I watched this week (Year 4, week 3)

The candidate, my terrific third thriller by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, about the fall of a (short!) fixer enmeshed in an overwhelming web of political corruption. Spanish 'House of Cards' meets 'Michael Clayton'. Sharp staging and fast story-telling, but it suffers from a bit too sudden ending. 8/10.

🍿

2 Finnish works, both starring Alma Pöysti:

🍿 Fallen Leaves, my 11th (?) dark film by Aki Kaurismäki. Sad and dreary lives of two lonely people, existing at the lowest levels of society. Part of his 'Proletariat' series, it tells of the same type of characters he always does: Menial workers who speak little, communicate without expressing themselves verbally, smoke and drink too much, who resort to chance meetings to lift them out of their gloomy lives.

At the same time, there's a strong 'Brief Encounter' vibes here, and a love story that ends like 'City lights' (with a dog named 'Chaplin'). 9/10.

🍿 Tove is a completely different kettle of Lohikeitto soup. A feel-good, often sunny biopic of Tove Jansson, the highly successful creator of The Moomins [which I never read and didn't really know].

It lovingly depicts her formative years, as she develops her beautiful art style, and discovers love, mostly to another bohemian woman. Alma Pöysti's acting is on a class of its own, unrecognisable when compared to 'Fallen Leaves': She's centered, strong, desirable. The scene when she kisses her (life-long) lover for the first time is tender and heartwarming. 8/10.

*Woman Director

🍿

Zhang Yimou's beautiful melodrama One second from 2020. A heartfelt metaphor about a political prisoner during the 'Cultural Revolution' who escapes from a work camp in the desert in order to search for his 14 year old daughter. An ode to the "Magic of Cinema" both as a tool for Maoist propaganda, as well as a fountain of emotions.

🍿

Jar city, my 4th sad film by the terrific Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur. Apparently he's been filming mostly in Hollywood the last decade, but everything I've seen by him is from Iceland. Another atmospheric police procedural Nordic Noir, grey and bleak, about murder mystery, old secrets from a small town, and parallel relationships of pain between fathers and daughters. 8/10

🍿

2 versions of the same tragic infatuation:

🍿 La Chienne ("The bitch") is an early-sound film by Jean Renoir. Meek, middle-aged Michel Simon is lost in a loveless marriage, falls for "Lulu", a prostitute, and is being exploited for money by her abusive pimp. It opens with a puppet show that declares that this story is not a drama or a comedy and has no moral message. But it's a cruel and cynical triangle of love, greed and betrayal.

🍿 14 years later, Fritz Lang remade the same Caution Tale into Scarlet street, a Hollywood version, made under the constrains of Production Code Administration of The Hays Office. Edward G. Robinson as "Chris Cross", the henpecked husband and Joan Bennett repeats their previous Lang roles from 'The woman in the window'.

🍿

"I didn't squawk about the steak, dear. I merely said that I didn't see that old horse that used to be tethered outside here"

W C Fields' last film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, with a script he wrote under the pseudonym Otis Criblecoblis. Also with Margaret Dumont as 'Madame Hemoglobin', Fourth Wall break, real laughs, crazy scene of falling from an airplane, a zany car race finale, and this exceptional Diner Scene. 8/10.

🍿

4 Soviet movies:

🍿 "To my dear father, from Makhmud".

Zerograd is another kind of weird. An absurdist Russian fairy tale. An engineer arrives at a sleepy town, and among the very mundane trappings, some details inexplicably stand out: A secretary who's completely naked, a cake he didn't order in the shape of his own head, a rock 'n' roll chef who commits suicide because the engineer didn't taste the cake. It's Kafkaesque and bizarre. 7/10.

🍿 "Yo Soy Fidel!"

My 2nd by Mikhail Kalatozov (after 'The cranes are flying') I am Cuba, Cuban-Soviet propaganda film about the Cuban revolution. Forgotten for decades because of its socialist messages, it was 'rediscovered' in the 1990's and regained its place among the world's top movies. Especially in regards to its cinematography, and dazzling camera work: Includes some of history's greatest tracking shots [equal to and better than with 'Goodfellas' Copacabana Club, 'Touch of Evil' and 'The Player' openings, 'Path of glory', etc.] Written by Yevtushenko: Guernica for cinema.

[Not Cubano, but I've been listening to Rita Payés's Nunca vas a comprender 100 times or more, and it reminds me of some of the scenes here.]

🍿 The Steamroller and the Violin, Tarkovsky's very first film, made for his film school diploma finals. A sweet story of a 7 year old violinist who befriends a steamroller driver, it gives similar innocent vibes as 'The red balloon'.

🍿 Chess Fever, my first silent comedy by Pudovkin, the influential developer of montage theories, and who feuded with Eisenstein about the political purpose of the edits. It also was the basis for Nabokov's novel 'The Luhzin defense'!

🍿

The cute Australian comedy The dish, my second by Rob Sitch (after 'The Castle'). How a remote radio astronomy observatory in New South Wales helped relay live-TV feed during Apollo 11 Moon landing. One implausible problem was to have only 4 guys manning the whole operation.

🍿

"Seven years of hamburgers..."

Behind the locked door, my first episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour TV show. Gloria Swanson punishes a gold digger who married and then killed her daughter.

🍿

I haven't seen A simple favour for a couple of months, so here I go again. Why is it so appealing to me? it's mostly because of how sexy-cute Anna Kendrick is. My previous structural analysis from a few watches ago still stands. 10/10.

🍿

2 documentaries of the week:

🍿 "This is the dawning of the age of asparagus..."

The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a compassionate story of a most amazing trailblazing woman. She dared talk publicly about masturbation and "intercourse" (what we now call 'fucking'), when even the words 'Clitoris' and 'Orgasm' were not permitted in most newspapers. I bought and read her 600 page report then, but let's not talk about the 70's.

Oh, sexual liberation in misogynist America, the culture that hates woman so much, it keeps oppressing them in today as it did for hundreds of years! It's blood-boiling tragic. 7/10. (Photo Above).

*Woman Director

🍿 I knew it would be painful for me to watch the 2023 documentary Israelism, and it surely was. A brave review and critique of the American Jewish relationship to Israel. How it calcified into a harsh dogma, embodying a narrative that Israel is a peace loving democracy. This dogma does not allow for even a tiny tinge of rebuke, and aligns itself today with the worst at the white-nationalist coalition. It follows two disillusioned American Zionists who come to realize that the propaganda they heard since birth covers a vast system of oppression, and their struggle to see what is really happening in Palestine.

Watching the heartbreaking realities of life under apartheid [even before the current genocide] felt like the worst stomach churning horror movie I've seen. Utterly depressing.

8/10, and if not for the overwhelming, constant mood-setting soundtrack, it would score even higher.

🍿

The hidden face, is a shallow Colombian thriller about a woman that 'disappeared'. It starts out bland, with uninteresting main characters, but midways drops one hell of an De Palma twist. 4/10.

🍿

A Few Shorts:

🍿 Jada, a sad little story about a homeless 7-year-old black kid surviving on her own on the streets of Venice Beach. The performance of the little girl who played her was tremendous. 8/10.

🍿 Pony, a 30-minute gem about the cutest 5-year-old girl, who has to spend a weekend with her jaded rock musician uncle, when her single mom must go out of town. The little actress is so so sweet, and she asks him questions like “How do bumblebees poop?”. Unsentimental, unexpected. 9/10.

*Woman Director

🍿"When you get an opportunity, it’s nothing more than a chance to be disappointed".

In The Dishwasher, a chef at a fine dining restaurant in New York City asks a Mexican dishwasher to find good tortillas. As good as any food movie - 7/10.

🍿 In Civil, a new door-to-door salesman, who is black, is invited inside a house for the first time, to demonstrate his set of kitchen knives, only to discover a confederate flag hanging on the wall.

🍿 A cute one note concept: A man is told by his doctor that he only has 1500 Words left to say, after which he'll die. His shocked reaction at the doctor's office depletes all but the last 50 words...

🍿 "Are you talking Dueling Banjos?..."

In Training Wheels, a socially-inapt woman rents a male escort for 48 hours, in order to practice 'relationships' before a 'real' date.

*Woman Director

🍿 In Dream of aces, an uncharismatic magician shows a simple card trick in a 'secret' gathering and explains how he learnt it. It's all tell and no show. 1/10.

🍿 And, I'm also looking forward to see the new short 'The heart' by new female filmmaker "Malia Ann"...

*Woman Director

🍿

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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havethetimeofyourstyles · 4 years ago

Text

Chapter One.

a/n: welcome to the first chapter of wtsgd! i’m so excited for you all to read this story and for what’s to come. please please please support content creators bc we’re doing this for free and it takes up a lot of energy to put out stories. so reblog, leave feedback, and send a message to motivate and support them. happy reading everyone <3

SERIES MASTERLIST | word count: 6.4k

come talk to me about wtsgd! i’d love to know your thoughts!

March 4, 2017

The trunk was filled with heavy boxes that were labeled with thick black sharpie, which didn’t seem to leave Luciana’s senses; and one too many suitcases filled with her many articles of clothing that she couldn’t get rid of—no matter how hard she tried—since she was too much of a hoarder and every piece of clothing seemed to have a lost memory in them that she tried very hard to think of, which only meant that it was worth keeping.

A droplet of sweat leaked down the side of her face due to her nonstop packing and heavy-lifting from her childhood room upstairs to her dad’s car in the driveway. It didn’t help that the sun was beaming down at her with every move like she was on center stage, in front of the spotlight, but it made much more sense for the sun to do that because that’s where she belonged: on stage.

Moving to Brooklyn, New York from Cambridge, Massachusetts during, what felt like, the coldest but the sunniest day of March wasn’t the smartest move—to be fair, Luciana was never one to make a smart move, anyways—but it was one that needed to be done. Plus, all the lifting seemed to have warmed her up.

Her destination, or now, home, in New York was one that she’d been anticipating for a while now. She had auditioned for the role as Kim in Miss Saigon on Broadway in November, and she’d gotten a callback in January for the role as the second Kim, meaning she would be on rotation to perform every week or two weeks, so the main Kim could rest. But she would still have to go to rehearsals and be on the side of the stage watching the show just in case she needed to jump in at the last minute.

It wasn’t her ideal way of playing the main lead, but nonetheless, she was grateful for the opportunity, and she would take any chance that was thrown at her to not only take another step towards her dream, but also another learning opportunity to make her a better actress.

Little Luci would’ve been so proud of the present Luci because it’d been her dream ever since she was younger, to be on stage and eventually, be on the big screen. Although she was far from completing her dream of being a face in Hollywood, this was a step that would take her to where she wanted to be in the future, and for that, she was proud of herself.

As a child, Luci had been in various commercials; from being the kid that played with slime and had no lines but to just put on a big smile while the sticky substance ran through her small hands, to being the daughter in a car commercial with one line that said “Are we there yet?” with a groan and a face of exhaustion as if she were the one driving the car. She hoped that these commercials would have someone recognize her talent, to cast her as a Disney star, but that would require moving to California, which her parents were wary of.

The commercials stopped when she reached middle school. Her early adolescent years consisted of an abundance of attitude and mood swings; Luci was a very tough and determined kid. Her love for acting had grown into a big balloon that was let go and on its way into the galaxy where no one could reach it—where no one could mess with her achieving her dream.

She would always stand in front of her white wooden framed mirror—with delicately painted colorful flowers around the border—reciting lines that she heard from a television series or the films that she watched, and she would write them down in her blue notebook. Sometimes, her parents would let her search the script up if it was available online. But oftentimes, she would test and challenge her memorization, and listen to it by ear; testing her mind, and eventually, her memorization skills were immaculate by the age of eleven.

It was perfect timing because by the time she was in middle school, she was able to snatch the roles she wanted when her school’s drama department held school plays. Her family thought that she would start to hate being on stage since school plays always ran until late evening, but being part of the productions had only enhanced her love for her talent, and it only prepared her for a quarter of what her future may look like.

All in all, from a very young age, she always knew that she wanted to become an actress. The spotlight or the center of the camera was where she always craved to be.

And she was finally making that dream come true.

A black Toyota Camry pulled into the space behind the car that was filled with her belongings. Ren and Beatrice, Luci’s lovely parents, both get out of the car with a pink box of donuts—a snack for the road and for when she gets to her new apartment.

“Ready, Lucky?” Beatrice asked, rubbing her daughter’s back. She was quite bummed to see Luci leave her childhood home, but she’s proud to see Lucky Luci chase her dreams. She was, after all, twenty-five and was bound to move out at some point, but to see it actually happen made Beatrice quite emotional.

“Ma, please, don’t cry…” Luci frowned as Beatrice pressed her fingertips to the corners of her eyes. She wrapped her arm around her mother’s shoulder, comforting her. “You’re all coming to New York in a month, right? To watch me on stage?” Luci asked, reassuring herself that she would see her family in a different state to rescue her from her loneliness.

Luci was an independent woman. She could do tasks by herself, go places alone, and she wouldn’t have a problem with it; she enjoyed the company of herself. But to know that at some point she might be alone—that everyone had left her behind or forgotten about her—was what scared her. She needed to know that the people who loved her unconditionally wouldn’t forget about her.

“Of course we’re going!” Ren exclaimed with a smile that Luci was going to miss seeing everyday. “We can’t miss our baby on the Broadway stage. If we could, we’d go to every damn show that you’re in, but that would be a lot of gas, no?”

She chuckled, nodding her head. She felt tears pricking her eyes at how supportive her parents were—they’ve always been. If she could, she would take them with her to New York, but her one bedroom apartment and their work said otherwise.

“Now, Lucky, don’t cry.” It was Beatrice’s turn to comfort her daughter. Like any parent, when they see their child cry, it breaks their heart and they cry too. “We’re gonna see you real soon. You can always come back anytime you want. We’re just a phone call away and we’ll pick you up,” Beatrice said between sniffles. The mother and daughter were embracing so tenderly and comfortingly—enjoying every last moment together until they got to see each other again.

“Jeez, you’re both the same—always crying!” Ren interrupted, making the two women laugh; and he was glad they found what he said amusing because he couldn’t handle the sad moment. “C’mon here, my Lulu.” Luci settled into her father’s arms, hugging him tightly. She’s always been her dad’s girl, despite having a close relationship with her mother, her relationship with her father was something that felt like home; he always knew what to say and when to say it. It helped that she was the female version of him. “You’re gonna be the best star out there, I’m sure of it. Now, I want you to have fun, alright? The fame, the fortune, the big city…it doesn’t amount to anything if you’re not having the time of your life” He comfortingly rubbed Luci’s back, holding her in a warm and tight squeeze.

Luci smiled at her father’s words. She was always a bit hard on herself when she would mess up or forget a line or a movement that correlates to a specific line in her script. When she was younger, she would beat herself up for a sliver of a moment; she would cry into her pillow—sobs loud enough that they were heard from downstairs. Luci would think that she wouldn’t become a well-known actress just because of the minor forgetfulness her mind had presented. But Ren would gently tap on her ocean blue door, letting himself in because he knew his daughter didn’t have the energy to get up and let him in, and he would sit beside her, gently urging her to sit up with him. Once she complied, after many groans of refusals, she would be glad she did because her father looked deeply into her eyes—and it was like looking into the reflection of clear and clean water—and told her she was a star. It was only three words, but those three words reminded her to never give up and get up when she would hit the pavement of what she felt like were her fallen hopes and dreams.

Ren would then end it with a statement of advice that had always lingered in her mind, resonating to the silent and harshful words that she tells herself. ‘Nothing will amount to anything if you’re not having the time of your life.’

A rush of gratitude settled upon her as her eyes became glossier by the seconds she was in Ren’s arms. Beatrice looked at her greatest treasures fondly, a smile appeared on her face only for it to be replaced by a look of confusion.

“Where is that damn brother of yours? He said he was going to be here at ten!” Beatrice interrupted the sweet moment she was having with her father, making them disconnect from the hug—just as Ren did with Luci and Beatrice.

Speaking of the devil, her dear brother was making his way towards home on the side of the street, wearing a grey sweatshirt that was stained with his sweat as his earphones were nestled in his ears, loudly playing music. He loudly sang along to some rap song, breath staggered as he rapped along with his hands.

Nathan smiled once he stepped foot onto the driveway as he took out his earphones, seeing his family look at him vigilantly. Luci laughed, shaking her head.

“Hey, there’s our superstar, little Ana!” Nathan opened his arms, ready to hug you but she quickly stopped him, curving her spine backwards to deny his hug. Ana had been one of the many nicknames her family had called her when she was growing up from the second half of her name, but Ana seemed to have stuck with Nathan as no one else really called her that, so it was his own personal nickname for her.

“Ew, please, do not hug me.” Her face wrinkled in disgust from the spell of her brother’s sweat from his run. Nathan chuckled, playfully rolling his eyes before turning towards his parents.

“Ooh, donuts-”

Beatrice slapped the back of his hand before he even got a chance to open the pink donut box. “Not until you shower and change. Lulu needs to be in Brooklyn by three!”

“Ow, mother!” Nathan whipped his hand away from Beatrice’s burning slap, although he was just playing around and being dramatic. “But fine, alright. The star always gets what she wants, am I right?” He dropped his head towards Luci, sighing before he hurried inside the house to take a quick shower and change.

Luci giggled, telling her parents that she would be right back to go up to her room to check if she’d gotten everything, even though she knew that she had everything, she just needed to reminisce alone for a moment.

Her feet took her up the wooden stairs, where she, for some unknown reason, always spent her time sitting on as she leaned her back against the wall and read or drew. Nathan always found it weird of her when they were doing homework when they were younger, but it was just one of the many fun anecdotes he could tell reporters if he’s asked about their childhood.

Pushing open her ocean blue door that she never changed because she loved the color, she was met with the emptiness of what was once her sanctuary. Despite the paint on the wall changing, the replacement of furniture, and rearrangement of her childhood room, Luci could still see the baby pink walls where she hung up various posters of her celebrity crushes when she was eight. She could still see herself walking over to her Cinderella white wooden dresser as she pulled out an inflatable microphone from her drawer before she walked over to her bed to sing her heart out with her cousin. In the corner of her room was her mirror that she painted colorful flowers along the border when she was younger, and she definitely did not want to change or get rid of it; it wasn’t difficult to stir up a memory when she was in front of that mirror because up until now, she was always reciting her lines to her own reflection until the late night.

All of these memories that Luci held within her heart would help her ground herself—remind her where she came from. No matter where her career took her, she would always be the girl that was firstly known in her room, crying, laughing, and acting within the four baby pink walls until she was sixteen, and then it changed to an ecru white. The feeling of nostalgia clutched her chest, and for the second time today—not even noon, yet—she found herself crying.

She silently sobbed in her sanctuary. Her chest felt tight, like her heart was grasping onto the memories, begging her to not leave, to not move on. But moving on would mean being stuck, and she didn’t want to feel stuck—she just never wanted to be in one place where the walls would slowly feel like they were closing in on her. She didn’t want to be in one place and eventually hated it, so for that, she had to move on.

A soft knock was heard from the outside of her bedroom, making Luci turn around hastily. She found Beatrice standing in the doorway, warmly smiling at her daughter, and keeping the tears at bay because she needed the comfort of her mother more than her mother’s tears.

“My Lucky Star…” Beatrice walked into the room, welcoming Luci into her arms. “You okay?”

Luci deeply inhaled and exhaled as she calmed herself down from her cries. “I’m alright. It’s just hard saying goodbye to this place—to my room.”’

“Oh, Lulu. You don’t need to say goodbye. I know you’ll be coming back here soon, anyways. I know you love home too much to completely stay away.” Beatrice was subtly trying to remind Luci about her love for her hometown, for her home, but her words also were trying to remind her about that certain love for her home and to never forget that love so she doesn’t stray away because Beatrice was simply afraid Luci would never want to come back once she discovered the luxury of her career. And even though she knew her Lulu wasn’t one to forget about her family, Beatrice would never admit her fear.

Luci sniffled, wiping her tears away as she pulled away from her mother’s embrace. “Yeah, I know. Just…doesn’t feel real that I’m leaving.”

“Sure, you’re leaving, but you’re going off to do bigger and better things. You were never one to stay in one place, physically and mentally—you were always moving, always loved learning more. And I’ve always been so intrigued and interested in how your mind works.”

“Ma…” The waterworks seemed to be the highlight of the move.

“I’m serious! I’m so genuinely proud of you. You’ve been keeping your talent—and I don’t mean ‘high school plays’ talent. I mean your Broadway, Hollywood, Academy winning talent. Now, you get to showcase your light in front of thousands of people.” Beatrice always had a way of boosting Luci’s self-esteem, making her ego a tad bit more bigger than it already was. She didn’t mind if her self-esteem had skyrocketed into the galaxy of her dreams, but she always reminded Luci that being humble and kind always outweighed being obnoxious and arrogant. “Now, enough with these tears. You’ve got a road trip to New York. C’mon, now.”

They made their way downstairs and out the door where Ren and Nathan were talking about the latest basketball game of the Celtics. The trunk was closed, and the only thing waiting was Luci herself.

“There she is! Ready?”

Luci took a deep breath, turning her head to look back at the pastel yellow house that had kept her safe for the past twenty-five years. From here, she knew everything was going to change. Whether it’d be for the good or if things would go downhill from here? She didn’t know; all she knew was that she was going to be doing what she loved and she was going to have the time of her life doing it.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

The state of Connecticut seemed to pass by quickly from the car as Nathan drove at a decent seventy miles per hour; the state vanished just as quickly as when they entered.

Luci mindlessly looked out the window, thinking about everything and nothing at once as she drowned out the music playing through the speakers of the car and Nathan’s voice singing along.

The cars passing by, the bystanders, and the locals filled the streets and highways, making her wonder what all of these people’s stories were—wondering if they lived in this city or if they were just stopping by to visit, or if they’re just going through the state to get to the one next door just as she was. Maybe she’s had an encounter or simply passed by them on the street in a world that seemed too large but small at the same time. She always pondered on whether everyone else thought the way she thought—if they wondered what her story was or the people around them.

The world is an interesting place and there were so many intriguing people out there, making her more excited by the minute as she takes on this new adventure in her life that would be completely life changing. Luci’s going to be meeting so many new people that, she would hope, have an impact on her personal life or career.

“Nervous?” Nathan broke the comfortable silence between them.

Luci raised her brows and curled her lips into her mouth. “A bit.”

He nodded, thinking for a moment. Nathan was always one to think before he spoke, and it was a quality that some people needed to learn how to do. He quickly learned that lesson when he was in high school; one of his friends, Johnny, and him were going back and forth joking around with one another. And for some odd reason, teenage boys liked to joke around about fucking everything, so Nathan had said “Yeah, I fucked your mom, what about it?” without thinking. Johnny stayed silent, the rest of their friends were waiting for his comeback, but they only received tears that glossed over his eyes before he ran off to a different part of campus, away from the lunch tables. Nathan found him behind the orchestra building with his face pressed on his kneecaps, crying. Later, he found out that Johnny’s mother had passed away before their sophomore year started and he hadn’t told anyone, which left Nathan quite speechless, but it was a lesson that he learned: to think before anything comes out of his mouth.

“I know you’ll do great. You were born to do this, born to be on stage. Everything you do is to greater your experience and opportunities. All the mistakes you’re gonna make, which we both know you’re gonna make, they’re gonna be learning lessons for you to continue doing what you’re good at doing; the mistakes are there so you can better yourself,” he reassured, occasionally glancing at you briefly before averting his eyes back onto the highway.

Luci smiled, never taking her eyes off her older brother. She leaned closer to the middle console, where his right arm was resting on the padded console. Hugging his arm tightly and resting her cheek on his shoulder, she accepted and appreciated his advice, his words. They made her heart fill up with so much gratitude and love, insanely grateful and happy that she had such an amazing and supportive family who always knew the right things to say when they could sense her nerves and anxieties powering through the roof.

“You’re gonna kill it out there. This is just a step towards where you wanna go, where you actually wanna be.”

She nodded, looking to her right as they quickly passed the ‘Welcome to New York’ sign from the state line of Connecticut and New York, and it was the sign indicating her new home.

Nathan pulled into the apartment’s parking garage, entering in with the code that the complex gave Luci on the silver keypad as the two watched the automatic gate arm swing up to the side, and Nathan entered the parking structure, parking in one of the many spaces available.

Luci excitedly got out of the car, rushing to the trunk where Nathan had opened it from inside the car. Unfortunately, she had forgotten to bring the hand dolly to help carry the boxes, which meant that the siblings were going to have to carry the many boxes she packed by her own hand and strength. But luckily, some of them weren’t that heavy; most of the items in the brown boxes were kitchenware and she figured she could just drag those.

One by one, they took one box each and headed for the elevator, where it took them to her apartment floor—floor four. Luci grabbed the keys from her purse that contained two copper keys hanging on one single silver loop and a small keyless sensor, and she unlocked her navy blue door, revealing her new apartment.

When she entered, she was met with a door across the entrance that she would use for her coats and shoes, things that she would need when she’s rushing out the door. Going through the small hallway in from the entrance, it led her to another small hallway to her left where her bedroom and guest bathroom was; and to her right, it would take her to the kitchen and living space. With four big windows with black window frames, the natural light really came in, making her place brighter for saving electricity.

Walking in and putting the boxes against the black cabinets in the kitchen, she immediately fell in love with the space, her space. Despite already taking a tour of the apartment a few months prior to her official move in day, it felt different being there for the second time because she now knew that this place was hers. She saw it in a different light, and she was already anticipating the memories she was going to make in her new home. The place was empty; and with every step and every noise from her mouth, the room would echo, and she loved it. There was something satisfying about the echo in an empty space that was hers, like she wanted to furnish the hell out of it, but at the same time, she didn’t mind the echo.

“This is your new home.” Nathan put an arm around Luci’s shoulder. He got a bit emotional seeing his baby sister grow up and move away from home, but he was excited for all of the experiences and memories she was going to make. Luci looked up at him, not saying anything but smiling as she was speechless. Nathan could practically feel the excitement run through her and all he did was chuckle at her speechlessness. “C’mon, let’s go get the rest of the boxes.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Luci and Nathan hauled the boxes from the car, to the elevator, and down the hallway to her apartment. There were about four more boxes left in the trunk, and they would’ve been finished by now if they hadn’t been taking breaks.

Nathan’s phone rang as he was sitting on the floor, leaning against the cabinets of the kitchen across from Luci who was sitting in the corner where her dining table would be.

“Hello?” Answered Nathan. “What? Tonight? I’m in New York. I’m helping my little sister move here. Uh, okay. Sure. Bye.” He groaned, standing up.

“Who was that?” Luci asked, nosy as she was.

“That was one of the board members at Mass General Hospital.” Luci’s eyes widened. “They just asked me if I could come in tonight to teach and supervise the new residents.” Nathan was a general doctor working in the Emergency Room as Mass General back in Boston. He’s always wanted to teach with all the knowledge he’s stored in his brain—always wanting someone to learn a thing or two when they spoke to him, and this was his chance.

“Holy shit, that’s amazing, Nate!” Luci stood up, excited for him.

He started to breathe a bit heavily and Luci immediately took notice; she could practically feel the nerves coming out of him, the same nerves she felt while going in for an audition. “Yeah, I actually have to leave, like, right now.”

“Hey, hey.” She quickly stopped him from running out of the building and out of his mind. “Come here—breathe with me for a second.” She held onto his wrists gently.

“Luci, I have to-”

He pulled away, but she tugged him back. “You’re going to drive yourself through the highway, and who knows what will happen, you might get pulled over and you won’t make it to the hospital. So, just take sixty seconds to breathe with me.”

For the remainder of the time that they had together, they took some deep breaths. She spoke encouraging and uplifting words to him to calm down his nerves and anxieties that he seemed to drive himself over a cliff for, and it seemed to work as Nathan’s shoulder’s weren’t so tense and the grip on her hands had loosened.

The two of them walked down to the parking garage where Nathan took down the last four boxes and placed them by the entrance of the complex. He was adamant on helping her get the last few boxes up to her apartment, but she shrugged it off, telling him that she was able to carry them and that he needed to leave because he’s most likely going to hit traffic during rush hour.

“Call me if you need anything, okay? I mean it. I will drive here in a heartbeat.”

“I will, I will-”

“Just not tonight,” he joked. “This is the highlight of my career.” His smile was so bright that it was like he was a little kid on Christmas again who just received a Hot Speed set from Santa.

Luci laughed, hugging him goodbye. “And call me if you need anything too. I’ll miss seeing you everyday,” she admitted, a slight frown on her face. She thought she’d have the entire day with Nathan, but it was cut short due to his work but she wasn’t mad about that at all because she knew there'd be plenty of times when he would drive down to walk along the New York streets and see her perform.

“I’m gonna miss you too, Ana. But I love you and I’ll see you next month!” He hurried into his car, and Luci watched him as he pulled out of the driveway, waving at the rear view mirror to say one last ‘see you later’ to his little sister.

Walking back to the curb where all of the boxes were set, Luci picked one up to test how heavy it was and she barely made it upright without almost hurting her back, so she put the box down to take a proper breather. She decided to drag the box closer to the door of the complex—which saved her a few steps without completely dropping the box that was labeled ‘glass plates’—and pulled the handle of the door, only to find it completely locked. There was a slight panic that flew through her until she realized that she needed her keyless tag that she had to press against the pad on the wall to get inside the complex, so she blew out a sigh of relief before reaching down to her pocket for her key, and with just her luck, her keys weren’t in her pocket or with her at all. Then she started to panic again.

Luci quickly walked out of the parking garage and to the front of the building where the leasing office was to find them closed, which was odd because it was Saturday, but apparently their servers were down so they just decided to take the entire day off. She rolled her eyes annoyingly, walking back to the garage in a fast manner because she didn’t want anyone to take her boxes, and so she figured that she could just wait until someone left the complex or arrived. She even left her phone at her place, so it wasn’t like she could call anyone to help her, but some sort of entertainment would help the time go by quicker.

Sitting on the curb in the garage, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, and humming the melody from the Miss Saigon soundtrack, an hour goes by until she sees someone walk past the automatic gate barrier, heading towards the entrance where he opened the door with his tag. Luci sprinted towards the door, calling out for help.

“Wait, wait!” The man turned around confusingly, taking his AirPod out of one ear. She caught up, taking deep breaths as she waved at the man. “Sorry, I’ve been out here for an hour and I completely forgot my key.” He didn’t say anything but stared at her, wondering why he’s never seen this woman before. The apartment complex really only had four floors, and he’s sure that he’s seen everyone who’s lived here. She noticed that he looked down at the boxes and back at her. “Oh, I just moved in.” He nodded more understandingly. “Do you mind holding the door for me?”

“Sure.” Was the first thing he told her before stepping aside to hold the door. She took another deep breath, getting into the correct form so she doesn’t throw her back out, and began to lift the heavy box. He noticed her struggling, and he felt foolish for not offering his help in the first place when he noticed the four boxes on the cement. “Here, sorry, let me help with that. Get the door, yeah?” Luci’s heart flipped once she heard his deep, accented voice before she gratefully thanked him and he grabbed the box from her, replacing her hands with his and the slightest brush of their fingers made her flustered; he held the box tightly to his chest without much struggle.

“Yeah, let me just get this one.” Luci grabbed a much lighter box that had all of her shoes, and held the door for him with her foot as he made his way inside of the building and to the elevator. He pressed the button with the arrow pointing up, and luckily, they didn’t have to wait for more than five seconds before the bell at the top chimed and the stainless steel doors opened.

With the heavy box in his hands, he still let Luci walk in first, which made her smile and he followed in as she pressed with the bold ‘4’ printed on it. He held the box in between his chest and the other end of the bar on the wall as they waited in silence as the elevator lifted them up to her apartment floor, and she brushed past him when he lifted his arm, gesturing her to go first.

Her front door was closed but it was unlocked, which only made sense, so she opened her door, putting the box next to the entrance and politely asking the man to put it next to the one you put down.

“Thank you so much, really. You have no idea how much I appreciate your help.”

“It’s no problem. I was the same when I moved here too—forgot my keys and was locked out.” He related to make her feel lighter about the situation since it was an honest mishap.

“Did you go to the leasing office?” She asked curiously.

“Yeah, but they were closed.”

“They’re closed today too! It’s like they do that on purpose whenever someone new moves in.” The man chuckled, scratching the back of his neck.

She hadn’t gotten a proper look at him since she was too distracted by trying to get into her building, but just by one real look at him, he was very attractive—probably too attractive to where she couldn’t think straight. He was wearing a pastel yellow and white striped button down that was a bit flowy and open, showing his white tank underneath that was tucked into his black skinny jeans. His tank top was low enough, exposing a patch of chest hair and his necklace that rested against his skin, in between his swallow tattoos just below his collarbones. Rings hugged his long fingers on both hands as he held two brown paper bags from Trader Joes. He was handsome, that’s for sure, and she felt like she was going to compare his beauty to all the other men that she was going to encounter in the future.

“They’re not very good at going into work, but if you give them a call then it’s like they’re a 24/7 help center.”

Luci nodded, chuckling. “Good to know. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I’ll help you with the last boxes.” Before she was about to protest and tell him that he didn’t have to help her anymore because she was sure the last ones were light, he made his way towards the elevator and she quickly followed.

To her surprise, one of the boxes was heavier than the other and she was glad that the man was able to carry it for her. They took the boxes up to her apartment, stacking it on top of the ones that were set down before she thanked him gratefully again.

“I really appreciate all your help.” She smiled, leaning against the doorframe.

“Not that I’m doubting your strength or anything, but how were you supposed to get those boxes up to your apartment?” He asked softly, not wanting to offend her by his words.

“Oh, my brother was supposed to help me, but he had to go back home for an emergency at work.” The man nodded, seeming that was the most acceptable answer, not like he was searching if she was lying. “But thank you for your help. You’re a true lifesaver,” she said with a soft smile on her face. Her tone was a bit flirty than she wanted it to be, but it naturally came out.

“It’s not a problem. I’ll see you around.” Luci hadn’t closed her door yet, but she found out that he was literally her neighbor on the opposite side of the wall. He didn’t even have to take two steps to get to his place—all he had to do was turn around and he was home. She smiled at the thought of that, glad that her neighbor was already so kind to her.

As he was fumbling with his keys, he eventually got his door unlocked, and Luci was itching to ask what his name was—maybe make her first friend during her first day living in the big city. The man felt his neighbor's eyes on him, burning through the back of his head, so he turned around at the same time she spoke.

“Uh, hey,” Luci called out. He was looking over his shoulder, pursing his lips as he raised his brows. “I was wondering if…you’d like to have dinner with me tonight? Y’know, to thank you for all your help and practically saving me while I was stranded.” She chuckled, playing with the tips of her fingers as she looked at him with hope.

He thought the invitation was nice, but…“It’s okay, really. I, uh, have plans already tonight,” he admitted honestly because he doesn’t make a habit of being dishonest.

Luci had some thick skin—she grew it throughout the years, and she had always been pretty confident. So many people would think that she could handle rejection well because she’s auditioned for many roles in her lifetime, and had been rejected for most of those roles. But the rejection that her neighbor handed to her so respectfully and politely was one that hit her the most, and she didn't know why.

Curling her lips into her mouth as she felt the pang of her heart sinking into her chest, she nodded and placed a small smile onto her face.

“Have fun tonight, then. I’ll see you around.” She grinned, hiding the slight bit of pain that she felt. He nodded, walking inside his apartment as she was in her doorway as well. “Oh, I’m Luci, by the way.” She introduced herself, feeling like she should have done that ten minutes ago, but it had slipped her mind.

The corner of the man’s mouth turned up into a sly smirk, and she nearly felt herself fall as she gripped the door handle tightly. It was enough to make the pain in her chest disappear, and all thoughts of the rejection that she would think about for the rest of the night vanished.

“Nice to meet you, Luci. I’m Harry.”

With that, Harry closed his door, putting a barrier between him and Luci, who was still standing in her doorway. She let out the longest sigh of her life, feeling like she’d been constricting herself from breathing properly for the last ten minutes.

Luci closed her door and leaned against it, looking down at the boxes that were resting by her feet. She softly smiled, her cheeks were starting to get warm, and she was fully aware that Harry was the cause of it.

come talk to me about your thoughts and feelings! hope you all enjoyed the first chapter, thank you for reading <3

ty to @sunflowers-styles for beta reading!

#harry styles fanfiction #harry styles angst #harry styles series #harry styles x oc #harry styles fic #harry styles ff #harry styles smut #harry styles fluff #harry styles au #boyfriend!harry #harry styles writing #harry styles solo #actress!oc

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maybankiara · 4 years ago

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PHONE SWAP (DREW STARKEY)

15: ALCOHOLISM IN HOLLYWOOD

summary: Addie Mallory is just your average economics student when she meets Drew Starkey at her local Target in Atlanta. This is where the story is supposed to end – a short meeting and a picture to go – except Drew accidentally leaves with the wrong phone, and the story begins, instead.

w/c: 500

a/n: ok so this is a couple of hours late bc i forgot about it (oops)

read on wattpad

previous part | series masterlist

Me | 5:19pm Does Patty need these papers today or can we just give them to her tomorrow?

Holden Bradfield | 5:21pm Today Holden Bradfield | 5:21pm But if we finish them before she comes to work we can chuck it on her desk and hope for the best ahahah

Me | 5:22pm Oh fuck I forgot she’s in on Sundays 😭 Me | 5:22pm Rip Me | 5:23pm How bad is the punishment if she doesn’t get it on time

Holden Bradfield | 5:24pm ...I’ve heard rumours of a cauldron and green smoke and sizzling Holden Bradfield | 5:25pm Are you sure you won’t manage to finish it today? Holden Bradfield | 5:26pm I’ll cover for you dw

Me | 5:28pm NO!!! Me | 5:28pm I’ll just take the blame on myself Me | 5:28pm You’ve got that other case to do

Holden Bradfield | 5:31pm It’s fine hahaha Harrington won’t eat me alive if I’m a day late

Me | 5:32pm No I don’t want you to be late bc of me Me | 5:32pm I’ll try to get my essay done, I ended up meeting a friend today and I’m so fucking behind rn

Holden Bradfield | 5:34pm You just work on your essay Holden Bradfield | 5:34pm You’re the one out of the two of us doing a full-time Master’s and a full-time job!! Holden Bradfield | 5:35pm I’ll finish up with our case and then you can pay me off next weekend, yeah?

Me | 5:38pm Are you sure you’re okay with that?

Holden Bradfield | 5:39pm You know Patty has a soft spot for me 😉

Me | 5:40pm No comment 😂 Me | 5:44pm Ok so I definitely won’t be able to finish the case today Me | 5:45pm I’ll buy you a bigass candy cane or that fluffy sweet thing that melts on your tongue Me | 5:56pm Just to see it all over your face again 😂

Holden Bradfield | 6:01pm That honest to god sounds like heaven!! Holden Bradfield | 6:02pm Although, I’d say this warrants more than just that...

Me | 6:04pm You’re saving my ass from being burnt in a witch’s cauldron. Name your price big boy 😂

Holden Bradfield | 6:02pm Let me take you out for dinner Holden Bradfield | 6:02pm Just the two of us, whenever you’re available

Me | 6:06pm Does Saturday work?

Holden Bradfield | 6:07pm You’re gonna keep me waiting a whole week? 😯

Me | 6:08pm In between work, classes, studying, and prescheduled plans, you’re lucky it’s just a week 😂

Holden Bradfield | 5:09pm Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth I guess hahah Holden Bradfield | 5:10pm 7pm?

Me | 5:10pm Probably, but I’ll have to let you know on the day 😊

Holden Bradfield | 5:11pm It’s a date, then!

◇

Me | 7:48pm Drewdrew Me | 7:48pm How’s LA?

Drew | 8:22pm Hot as always Drew | 8:22pm Come think of it, I’m pretty sure underneath hell there’s LA Drew | 8:23pm So I meant hell under LA but hey same shit!!

Me | 8:25pm Lol both are probably true

Drew | 8:26pm Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised 😂 Drew | 8:26pm How’s Atlanta? Drew | 8:27pm I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already

Me | 8:27pm Boring as fuck honestly Me | 8:28pm I’ve been focusing on my studies for a bit and I’ve barely left the house, Marianne wants to crucify me lol

Drew | 8:31pm Hey at least you’re not roommates with Austin Drew | 8:32PM I love the guy but we never get anything done when we’re together 😂

Me | 8:33pm Oh Marianne and I are the same Me | 8:33pm That’s why we came up with the rule of not spending a lot of time if we’ve got things to do hahaha

Drew | 8:35pm That’s smart Drew | 8:35pm Hanging out with Austin makes me lazy and it only gets worse when the others come over Drew | 8:36pm All we do is drink 😂

Me | 8:37pm Well that sounds like your dream job!! Me | 8:37pm Mr. White Claw Basic Bitch must enjoy himself!!

Drew | 8:38pm Addie............ Drew | 8:38pm I don’t drink ONLY white Claw

Me | 8:39pm Mhm Me | 8:39pm hey at least WC hangovers aren’t that bad!!! Me | 8:40pm I mean if babies can drink WC then so can you

Drew | 8:40pm you WISH you could drink as much as I do

Me | 8:42pm oh no tyvm Me | 8:42pm I drink just enough 😌�� Me | 8:42pm my hangovers are !! nonexistent!! except that time we met lmao

Drew | 8:43pm you were hungover?? Drew | 8:43pm Couldn’t tell 😂 Drew | 8:43pm you should always drink in the morning and hangovers are bye bye

Me | 8:44pm Marianne’s been trying to get me to do it forever Me | 8:45pm But now at least I got a topic for my next essay

Drew | 8:45pm how to cure hangovers?

Me | 8:46pm Close enough! Me | 8:46pm Alcoholism in hollywood 🥰

Drew | 8:45pm Hmmm sure sure Drew | 8:45pm How does that relate to either politics or economics? 🤔

Me | 8:46pm I’ll figure it out Me | 8:46pm Just you watch

Drew | 8:47pm Sure Drew | 8:47pm 👀

Me | 8:48pm 😂😂

◇

16: A LITTLE BIRDIE

tagging. @jjmaybanksbaby @taiter-tots @sacredto @snkkat @drewswannabegirl @yeslifeofateen @rudypnkw @stfukie @x-lulu @drewstarkey @butgilinsky @solllaris @hyperactive2411 @chasefreakinstokes @surferkie @jroseron @k-k0129 @starlightstories

#drew starkey #outer banks #obx #drew starkey x oc #drew starkey fanfiction #phone swap series

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vagabundista · 4 years ago

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It's so frustrating to hear arguments like these from people who claim to be progressive. Lulu Wang is implying that it is impossible for someone who is not Chinese to tell a competent story about a Chinese subject, that a filmmaker should only tell stories about their own nationality or ethnicity. It's a grotesque line of thinking.

Even if Ron Howard doesn't have an intimate knowledge of northeastern Chinese culture, he can certainly learn about it! Read books, make interviews, travel to the area, hire consultants. The subject of the film is an executive producer and fully supports the decision to hire Howard. Does his voice not matter?

Wang goes on to say that she has no interest in directing the film herself, so what was the point of saying that she's also a Chinese-born classically-trained pianist? It would be much more understandable if she just confessed that she's disappointed that she wasn't even considered for the opportunity, since the bulk of her work (which I'm not familiar with) deals with Chinese culture.

And finally she says that Mulan (2020) failed because the director is white. Mulan (1998) was directed by two white men and is considered one of the best animated films of all time. Niki Caro, the director of Mulan (2020), previously directed Whale Rider (2002) a formidable, critically-acclaimed film about a Māori family. Clearly, 2020 Mulan's shortcomings have nothing to do with Caro's ethnicity or an inherent lack of intercultural competency on her part.

For fuck's sake, this argument falls apart instantly when you consider that a straight Taiwanese man directed a beautiful love story about gay cowboys in rural Wyoming! And one about 19th century British gentry! And one about an Indian teenager who befriends a tiger!

There's a legitimate complaint about the lack of opportunity for Asian-American filmmakers in Hollywood buried somewhere underneath all this, but resorting to such a regressive argument to express that is obnoxious. I don't want to work in an industry where my capacity to tell certain stories is defined by my skin tone or where I was born.

#sorry I've been screaming internally about this all day #the amount of support that she's getting for this is ridiculous

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migleefulmoments · 5 years ago

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Why do they keep calling it LGBT when they only give a fuck about the G, and even then, only Darren's G. Or should I say, Darren's D? They have literally mocked and insulted lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people (remember when they used to call Mia "man hands"?) Y'all need to seriously quit trying to pretend you're allies and start realizing you're nothing but homophobic and bigoted assholes. Y'all know nothing about LGBT+ beyond how wet two dicks make you.

That is an excellent question. You’re spot on- they only care about Darren’s D and only if he is sleeping with Chris.

I just can’t imagine screaming “I AM an ally goddamnit”(while stomping my feet) while gleefully using toilet emoji’s to represent Lulu, openly hating every LGBTQ+ event and the people who host them at TSG, mocking TSG for being an LGBTQ+ safe space, insulting lesbians, bisexual and transgender persons and outing ccDarren every chance they get. Flowers just weaponized Nicholas Petricca’s sexuality simply so she could bully Mia and Lulu by calling them beards- which obviously isn’t true (my post on it (X)) but she took the stupid further by claiming Mia and Lulu were holding their “clients” in “distinctive” beard positions. To be so openly hostile and homophobic but still believe you are an ally worthy of praise is asinine. I respect the LGBTQ+ community enough to not feel comfortable screaming “I’m an ally” if I didn’t understand any of the issues that affect the community. The community is so diverse which makes it more difficult to get a grasp on those issues but it’s easier than ever in 2020. YouTube alone provides allies with access to members of the community sharing their experiences in their own words. Unbeknownst to Abby and Flowers, et.al, the list of concerns goes far beyond bullying and closeting- the only two issues they recognize but let’s be real, they don’t actually understand the real issues around bullying and closeting. I’ve said it before but it is so true, everything they know about the gay community they learned on Glee... or simply made it up. Every time a gay man comes out, they quickly reblog the story and a long diatribe about the horrors of Hollywood, the abusive TPTB who force closeting on innocent sweet gay Darren men, the horror of not being able to freely live one’s life or love whomever he wants. Each member of the coven would then add their 2 cents to the conversation-ticking off all the main cc talking points. But none of them ever bothered to read the actual story- nobody cared to actually HEAR what the men said about their coming out or working in Hollywood- they just wanted to hijack their story for their own validation. It didn’t matter to them that no one said they were forced to stay in the closet by their team or a studio, no one talked about having a team who holds all the power and works to destroy them. Every one did talk about their mental health, low self-esteem, depression, bullying when they were younger, and concerns about getting no work. Some did admit to pressure from teams and studios who are worried about their money-nobody forced anyone to stay in the closet

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leonelaalejandro · 4 years ago

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Tumblr Multimedia Journal Assignment 1: #OscarsSoWhite

1.What is the subject of your film, program, or internet/social media selection? Provide a brief summary, describing your selection and how it relates to our course topics, readings, and screenings.

2.Referring to related and appropriate readings and screenings from the course, describe how your selection represents racial and ethnic identities (and if applicable, intersectionality). In what ways does this media generate a conversation regarding race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity?

3.How does your selection relate to the course readings, screenings and discussions? Reflect upon the representation and circulation of racial and ethnic identities in popular visual culture. Your reflections should be attentive to the intersectionalities of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, socioeconomic class and gender

4.Include Images, video,audio,links or other media elements for your selection.Make sure you cite everything you use. Please make sure to use either MLA or Chicago 16th Style for citations. The more media-rich the post, the higher the grade.

The first media selection I will be writing about is the hashtag #oscarssowhite. April Reign created the hashtag five years ago when the nominees for the 2015 Oscars were announced. All 20 acting nominations were given exclusively to white actors. In 2015, the Academy membership was overwhelmingly white and male (92% and 75% respectively.) Reign was watching the nominee announcement one morning while getting ready for work and immediately noticed the lack of diversity, prompting her to tweet “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair.” This created a snowball effect of more tweets: “#OscarsSoWhite they wear Birkenstocks in the wintertime.” and “#OscarsSoWhite they have a perfect credit score.” Franklin Leonard, the founder of Black List, noted that this was only a year after “12 Years a Slave” won and how minority communities felt they were led to believe that there had been a real change in the white-washed Hollywood industry. In 2015, there also weren’t any women directors nominated or any visibly disabled people, so although #oscarssowhite directly refers to race, it’s really about the underrepresentation of all minority groups. This has been a common trend from our class materials. White people are constantly put in the center of all the media we consume, in television and in movies. We are constantly being taught that white means neutrality, a white person could be anything. They can play characters that are complex and are given proper arcs and development and their race has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Something that is interesting to note is that in the Oscars, the few women that have been nominated for best actress or supporting actress, a large part of them are playing roles of women going through hardships, or women who have lived a life full of struggles. Cynthia Erivo was nominated for the role of Harriet Tumban in “Harriet” in the 2020 Oscars. Erivo portrayed the life of a woman born into slavery who escaped and became an abolitionist and political activist. In 2014, Lupita Nyong’o won best supporting actress for her performance in “12 Years a Slave” but got snubbed from even a nomination for her part in Jordan Peele's critically acclaimed horror movie “Us.” Nyong’o faces the task of playing two completely separate actors, so what’s the difference between her characters in both movies? Trauma. I feel like this relates closely to Dyer’s “On the Matter of Whiteness.” Lupita Nyong’o gets recognition from the Academy when she plays a character based entirely around her race (and the suffering that came as a result), but when she plays a fully realized, multifaceted character (two actually) in “Us”, a nomination is not merited. This goes back to the tradition of white representing relatability and neutrality and non-white meaning a representation of their race.

There’s a trend of seeing nominations for Oscars throughout the years being predominantly about the experiences and lives of straight white men. With the larger part of the Academy being that demographic, we can infer that many times, the way they choose actors and films to nominate, it has to do with the lens they view it through. Perhaps if the Academy was more inclusive in its members (more women, more people of color, more people from the LGBTQ+ community), Oscar nomination lists would look much more different. Through the entirety of the Oscars (over 90 years), only a total of five women have ever been nominated in the category for best director and out of all of them, only one has won, being Kathryn Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker” in 2010. There have been some changes in the Oscars since 2015. In 2020, Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” made history by being the first non-English film to win best picture, and also getting five other awards, including best director and best original screenplay. However, none of the nominations went to the cast despite their top tier performances. Also in 2020, Greta Gerwig was snubbed in the best director category for “Little Women.” Gerwig was nominated in 2018 for “Lady Bird”, being the only woman nominated for best director in the last decade. In 2019, three out of four of the acting categories were won by non-white actors (Rami Malek, Mahershala Ali, and Regina King.) Since the start of #oscarssowhite, the Academy has doubled the number of POC members from 8% to 16%, which is still ridiculously low. Incredible directors and films with representation and diversity continue getting snubbed by the Academy (Kasi Lemmons for “Harriet”, Lulu Wang for “The Farewell”, Lorene Scafaria for “Hustlers.”)

In Peggy McIntosh’s list at the end of “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, she includes:

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented.

12. I can go into a book shop and count on finding the writing of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair.

26. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

All of these have to do with finding proper representation of your race. This is something that white people don’t really have to worry or think about as much. We’ve seen it year after year at the Oscars, nominee lists full of white actors and directors. The lack of people of color on these lists has nothing to do with their merit or the quality of their work. It doesn’t have to do with box office numbers or how the audience or critics respond to it. This problem is ingrained into the whiteness of the Academy, and until they open up a space for diversity and inclusivity, the situation won’t ever truly change.

Dyer, Richard. “On the Matter of Whiteness.” Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, by Brian Wallis and Coco Fusco, International Center of Photography, 2003, pp. 301–311.

Ferrari, Alex. “Are the Oscars Too White...Again? #OscarsSoWhite.” Indie Film Hustle®, 26 Dec. 2019, indiefilmhustle.com/oscars-so-white-oscarssowhite/.

Johnson, Zenzele. “#OscarsSoWhite: Why Representation Matters.” The LAMP, 20 July 2016, thelamp.org/oscarssowhite-why-multi-dimensional-representation-matters/.

Jurgensen, John. “'Parasite' Makes History at the Oscars.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 10 Feb. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/the-stars-are-out-as-the-2020-oscars-kick-off-11581296482.

Mcintosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1989) .” On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning, 2019, pp. 29–34., doi:10.4324/9781351133791-4.

Reality Check Team. “Oscars 2020: How Diverse Are the Oscars?” BBC News, BBC, 10 Feb. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/51094069.

Reign, April. “#OscarsSoWhite Creator: With a Mostly White Academy, What Could We Expect? (Column).” Variety, Variety, 15 Jan. 2020, variety.com/2020/film/news/oscarssowhite-nominations-diversity-april-reign-1203467389/.

Reign, April. “OscarsSoWhite Is Still Relevant This Year.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 1 Mar. 2018, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/oscarssowhite-is-still-relevant-this-year.

Ugwu, Reggie. “The Hashtag That Changed the Oscars: An Oral History.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/movies/oscarssowhite-history.html.

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hotvintagepoll · 9 months ago

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Propaganda

Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box, Diary of a Lost Girl)—Louise Brooks started off as a dancer and went to work in the Follies before going to Hollywood. Disappointed with her roles there, she went to Germany and proceeded to make Pandora's Box, the first film to show a lesbian on-screen (not her but one of her many doomed admirers in the film), and Diary of a Lost Girl, both of which are considered two of the greatest films of the 20th century. She helped popularize the bob and natural acting, acting far more subtly than her contemporaries who treated the camera as a stage audience. After the collapse of her film career and a remarkably rough patch as a high-end sex worker, she was rediscovered and did film criticism, notably "Lulu in Hollywood," which Rodger Ebert called "indispensable." Also, christ. Look at her.

Ruth Weyher (Secrets of a Soul, Warning Shadows)—my vintage crush

This is round 1 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Louise Brooks propaganda:

"Defined the style of the modern flapper. A gaze that could make a stone fall in love."

"Louise Brooks left a legend far greater than her real achievement as an actress, but even today few people have seen her films. In our own time, the fascination with Brooks seems to have begun in 1979 with a profile by Kenneth Tynan in the New Yorker, which revealed that the actress who made her last movie in 1938 was alive and living in Rochester, N.Y. Such was the power of Tynan's prose that people began to seek out her existing films, primarily this one, to discover what the fuss was about. What we see here is a healthy young woman -- she was 23 when the film was released -- with whom the camera, under G.W. Pabst's influence, is fascinated. There is a deep paradox in Brooks and her career: the American girl who found success in the troubled Europe between two wars; the vivid personality who briefly dazzled two continents but faded into obscurity; the liberated woman who had affairs with such prominent men as CBS founder William S. Paley as well as with women including (by her account) Greta Garbo but wound up a solitary recluse. And all of this seems perfectly in keeping with her most celebrated role in Pandora's Box. For despite her bright vitality, her flashing dark eyes and brilliant smile, Brooks's Lulu becomes the ultimate femme fatale, careering her way toward destruction, not only of her lovers but eventually of herself."

"She invented having bangs to indicate that you have borderline personality disorder"

"chances are if youve ever seen a "flapper girl" character or even just art of a generic flapper type made after the 20s it was based on her appearance - particularly the bob hairstyle! she had some pretty rough experiences through her life before during and after her tumultuous acting career which ended in 1938 but she made it to the 80s, wrote an autobiography and did a lot of interviews that she was never afraid of being honest in about her own life or peers of the age, and apparently was unabashed about some affairs she had with well known women (including greta garbo!!)"

"She read Proust and Schopenhauer on set between sets. She was one of the original flappers/new women of the 1920s. She had a one night stand with Garbo and was the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Truly a stone cold fox."

"on her wikipedia page it says her biographer said she "loved women as a homosexual man, rather than as a lesbian, would love them" and while i have no idea if this is true or not i thought that was very gender of her"

"despite being american she was big in german expressionist films and thus her aesthetic was unmatched!!"

So far ahead of her time in regard to portraying complicated women. Timeless elegance. "I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.” - Louise Brooks

Ruth Weyher propaganda:

#ruth weyher #louise brooks #hotvintagepoll #ladies 1 #fuck that old woman

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fictionz · 5 years ago

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New Fiction 2019

Previously: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013

Novels

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003)

Short Stories

"The Geranium" by Flannery O'Connor (1946)

"The Barber" by Flannery O'Connor (1947)

"Wildcat" by Flannery O'Connor (1947)

Video Games

Super Mario Bros. 3 dev. Nintendo EAD (1988)

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening dev. Grezzo (2019)

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D dev. Grezzo (2015)

Movies

Mary Poppins Returns dir. Rob Marshall (2018)

The Bone Collector dir. Phillip Noyce (1999)

American Gangster dir. Ridley Scott (2007)

Glass dir. M. Night Shyamalan (2019)

Escape Room dir. Adam Robitel (2019)

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday dir. Adam Marcus (1993)

Alita: Battle Angel dir. Robert Rodriguez (2019)

Captain Marvel dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (2019)

Us dir. Jordan Peele (2019)

The Grand Budapest Hotel dir. Wes Anderson (2014)

Dragged Across Concrete dir. S. Craig Zahler (2018)

The Favourite dir. Yorgos Lanthimos (2018)

Creed II dir. Steven Caple Jr. (2018)

If Beale Street Could Talk dir. Barry Jenkins (2018)

A Private War dir. Matthew Heineman (2018)

The Spectacular Now dir. James Ponsoldt (2013)

Shazam! dir. Peter Safran (2019)

Avengers: Endgame dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (2019)

El Chicano dir. Ben Hernandez Bray (2019)

Pokémon Detective Pikachu dir. Rob Letterman (2019)

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum dir. Chad Stahelski (2019)

Brightburn dir. David Yarovesky (2019)

Booksmart dir. Olivia Wilde (2019)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters dir. Michael Dougherty (2019)

Kill the Irishman dir. Jonathan Hensleigh (2011)

Lord of War dir. Andrew Niccol (2005)

Always Be My Maybe dir. Nahnatchka Khan (2019)

Toy Story 4 dir. Josh Cooley (2019)

Armour of God dir. Jackie Chan and Eric Tsang (1986)

Armour of God II: Operation Condor dir. Jackie Chan (1991)

Spider-Man: Far From Home dir. Jon Watts (2019)

Midsommar dir. Ari Aster (2019)

1922 dir. Zak Hilditch (2017)

The Book of Eli dir. The Hughes Brothers (2010)

Crawl dir. Alexandre Aja (2019)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood dir. Quentin Tarantino (2019)

The Farewell dir. Lulu Wang (2019)

Burn After Reading dir. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (2008)

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark dir. André Øvredal (2019)

Ready or Not dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett (2019)

It dir. Andy Muschietti (2017)

It Chapter Two dir. Andy Muschietti (2019)

Hustlers dir. Lorene Scafaria (2019)

Rambo: Last Blood dir. Adrian Grunberg (2019)

Ad Astra dir. James Gray (2019)

Scream 3 dir. Wes Craven (2000)

Candyman dir. Bernard Rose (1992)

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie dir. Vince Gilligan (2019)

Ex Machina dir. Alex Garland (2014)

Under the Skin dir. Jonathan Glazer (2013)

Taking Lives dir. D. J. Caruso (2004)

Mystic River dir. Clint Eastwood (2003)

Mandy dir. Panos Cosmatos (2018)

The Lighthouse dir. Robert Eggers (2019)

Terminator: Dark Fate dir. Tim Miller (2019)

Fallen dir. Gregory Hoblit (1998)

Cam dir. Daniel Goldhaber (2018)

Executive Decision dir. Stuart Baird (1996)

Fracture dir. Gregory Hoblit (2007)

The Pelican Brief dir. Alan J. Pakula (1993)

16 Blocks dir. Richard Donner (2006)

The Brave One dir. Neil Jordan (2007)

Perfect Stranger dir. James Foley (2007)

The Game dir. David Fincher (1997)

Enter the Dragon dir. Robert Clouse (1973)

Gothika dir. Mathieu Kassovitz (2003)

The Interview dir. Craig Monahan (1998)

The Captive dir. Atom Egoyan (2014)

Parasite dir. Bong Joon-ho (2019)

Doctor Sleep dir. Mike Flanagan (2019)

Jojo Rabbit dir. Taika Waititi (2019)

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood dir. Marielle Heller (2019)

Ford v Ferrari dir. James Mangold (2019)

Knives Out dir. Rian Johnson (2019)

Queen & Slim dir. Melina Matsoukas (2019)

21 Bridges dir. Brian Kirk (2019)

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale dir. Jalmari Helander (2010)

Jumanji: The Next Level dir. Jake Kasdan (2017)

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle dir. Jake Kasdan (2019)

Richard Jewell dir. Clint Eastwood (2019)

Frozen II dir. Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee (2019)

The Long Kiss Goodnight dir. Renny Harlin (1996)

Fractured dir. Brad Anderson (2019)

The Lake House dir. Alejandro Agresti (2006)

Imagine That dir. Karey Kirkpatrick (2009)

Daddy Daycare dir. Steve Carr (2003)

Eat Pray Love dir. Ryan Murphy (2010)

The Angel dir. Ariel Vromen (2018)

Klaus dir. Sergio Pablos (2019)

Dolemite Is My Name dir. Craig Brewer (2019)

Cats dir. Tom Hooper (2019)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dir. J. J. Abrams (2019)

Uncut Gems dir. Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie (2019)

A Nightmare on Elm Street dir. Samuel Bayer (2010)

Death Becomes Her dir. Robert Zemeckis (1992)

Casino Royale dir. Martin Campbell (2006)

TV Episodes

What We Do in the Shadows - "Pilot" (2019)

Hanna - “Forest” (2019)

Bob’s Burgers - “Brunchsquatch” (2017)

Bob’s Burgers - “The Silence of the Louise” (2017)

Bob’s Burgers - “Sit Me Baby One More Time” (2017)

The Simpsons - “Holidays of Future Passed” (2011)

Star Trek: Discovery - "The Vulcan Hello” (2017)

The Simpsons - “Treehouse of Horror XXX” (2019)

The Simpsons - “Thanksgiving of Horror” (2019)

TV Series

Parks and Recreation (2009-2015)

The Punisher - Season 2 (2019)

Luther - Series 5 (2019)

Tuca & Bertie (2019)

Jessica Jones - Season 3 (2019)

Black Mirror - Seasons 4 & 5 (2017, 2019)

Mindhunter - Season 2 (2019)

Penny Dreadful (2014-2016)

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

The Good Place - Season 4 (2018)

Disenchantment - Part 2 (2019)

American Horror Story: Apocalypse (2018)

Unbelievable (2019)

Cheers (1982-1993)

The Mandalorian (2019)

#new fiction #2019

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remedialreviews · 5 years ago

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Remedial Awards, 2019

It’s time again for the Remedial Awards! I have watched more than 70 feature films released in 2019, 29 of which have been nominated for one or more Academy Awards (33 narrative feature films have been nominated for Oscars this year). Not that many will read this anyway, but I want to recognize that I am just another in a long list of white men who have weighed in on film this year (and every year since film was first developed), and have no “buts” to express about it: I dream of a world where we’re given colour in the Best Actor list and where women are nominated for Best Director, and the prevalence and dominance of the white male voice is a major contributing factor to the continuing lack of diversity in Hollywood.

Below, find my lists for most every feature category, ranked in order of my own preference. Those left out by the Academy that I believe deserved nominations are ranked and crossed out, while those that were nominated and (in my opinion) should not have been, are ranked below a stroke. I have not included Razzies this year, but know that I absolutely detested Joker. My largely uninformed prediction for the winner of each category will be marked with an asterisk. Films or performances I have not seen have been recorded in italics beneath the category. Without further ado . . .

Supporting Actress:

1. Florence Pugh ( Little Women ) 2. Adele Haenel ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) 3. Thomasin McKenzie ( Jojo Rabbit ) 2. Margot Robbie ( Bombshell ) 5. Penelope Cruz ( Pain and Glory ) 6. Jennifer Lopez ( Hustlers ) 3. Laura Dern ( Marriage Story )* 4. Scarlett Johansson ( Jojo Rabbit )

Kathy Bates ( Richard Jewell )

Makeup and Hair:

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire 1. 1917 2. Bombshell* 4. Little Women 3. Judy -------------------------- Joker

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Costume Design:

1. Jacqueline Durran ( Little Women ) 2. Dorothée Guiraud ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) 3. Andrea Flesch ( Midsommar ) 4. Kym Barrett ( Us ) 2. Mayes C. Rubeo ( Jojo Rabbit ) 6. Norma Moriceau ( Aladdin ) 3. Arianne Phillips ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood )* 4. Sandy Powell and Christopher Peterson ( The Irishman ) -------------------------- Mark Bridges ( Joker )

Production Design:

1. Dennis Gassner and Lee Sandales ( 1917 ) 2. Lee Ha-Jun and Cho Won Woo, Han Ga Ram, and Cho Hee ( Parasite ) 3. Donal Woods ( Downton Abbey ) 3. Barbara Ling and Nancy Haigh ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood )* 4. Bob Shaw and Regina Graves ( The Irishman ) 6. Henrik Svensson ( Midsommar ) 7. David Crank ( Knives Out ) 5. Ra Vincent and Nora Sopkova ( Jojo Rabbit )

Cinematography:

1. Roger Deakins ( 1917 )* 2. Claire Mathon ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) 3. Drew Daniels ( Waves ) 2. Jarin Blaschke ( The Lighthouse ) 5. Pawel Pogorzelski ( Midsommar ) 6. Fejmi Daut and Samir Ljuma ( Honeyland ) 7. Hong Gyeong-Pyo ( Parasite ) 8. Phedon Papamichael ( Ford v Ferrari ) 9. Yorick Le Saux ( Little Women ) 10. Anna Franquesa Solano ( The Farewell ) -------------------------- Robert Richardson ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ) Rodrigo Prieto ( The Irishman ) Lawrence Sher ( Joker )

Best International Feature Film:

1. Parasite* 2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire 2. Pain and Glory 3. Corpus Christi 5. I Lost My Body 4. Honeyland 7. Dirty God 8. Atlantique 9. Ash is Purest White

Les Miserables

Supporting Actor:

1. Willem Dafoe ( The Lighthouse ) 1. Tom Hanks ( A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood ) 3. Timothee Chalamet ( Little Women ) 4. Lucas Hedges ( Waves ) 2. Anthony Hopkins (The Two Popes) 6. Asier Etxeandia ( Pain and Glory ) 7. Dean-Charles Chapman ( 1917 ) 3. Al Pacino ( The Irishman ) -------------------------- Joe Pesci ( The Irishman ) Brad Pitt ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood )*

Animated Feature:

1. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World 2. I Lost My Body 3. Klaus 4. Missing Link 5. Abominable 5. Toy Story 4*

Animated Short:

1. Dcera (Daughter) 2. Hair Love* 3. Memorable 4. Sister 5. Kitbull

Visual Effects:

1. Avengers: Endgame* 2. The Lion King 3. 1917 4. Ad Astra 5. Ford v Ferrari 4. Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker -------------------------- The Irishman

Razzie: Alita: Battle Angel

Live Action Short Film:

1. Brotherhood 2. Nefta Football Club 3. A Sister -------------------------- The Neighbors’ Window*

Saria

Original Screenplay:

1. Rian Johnson ( Knives Out ) 2. Bong Joon-ho and Jin Won Han ( Parasite )* 3. Lulu Wang ( The Farewell ) 4. Céline Sciamma ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) 3. Noah Baumbach ( Marriage Story ) 6. Mateusz Pacewicz ( Corpus Christi ) 7. Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, and Katie Silberman ( Booksmart ) 8. Robert Eggers and Max Eggers ( The Lighthouse ) 4. Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns ( 1917 ) -------------------------- Quentin Tarantino ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood )

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Greta Gerwig ( Little Women )* 2. Taika Waititi ( Jojo Rabbit ) 3. Anthony McCarten ( The Two Popes ) 4. Andrew Huculiak ( Ash ) 5. Lorene Scafaria ( Hustlers ) -------------------------- Steven Zaillian ( The Irishman ) Todd Phillips and Scott Silver ( Joker )

youtube

Original Score:

1. Alexandre Desplat ( Little Women ) 2. Thomas Newman ( 1917 ) 3. Rupert Gregson-Williams ( Abominable ) 3. Randy Newman ( Marriage Story ) 5. Cayne McKenzie ( Ash ) 6. Daniel Lopatin ( Uncut Gems ) 4. John Williams ( Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker ) -------------------------- Hildur Guðnadóttir ( Joker )*

Razzie: Robbie Robertston ( The Irishman )

youtube

Original Song:

1. I’m Gonna Love Me Again ( Rocketman )* 2. Into the Unknown ( Frozen II ) 3. I’m Standing With You ( Breakthrough ) 4. Stand Up ( Harriet ) 5. I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away ( Toy Story 4 )

Lead Actor:

1. Tim Guinee ( Ash ) 1. Adam Driver ( Marriage Story ) 3. George MacKay ( 1917 ) 2. Antonio Banderas ( Pain and Glory ) 5. Kelvin Harrison, Jr. ( Waves ) 6. Adam Sandler ( Uncut Gems ) 7. Robert Pattinson ( The Lighthouse ) 3. Jonathan Pryce ( The Two Popes ) 9. Aaron Paul ( El Camino ) 10. Bartosz Bielenia ( Corpus Christi ) -------------------------- Leonardo DiCaprio ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ) Joaquin Phoenix ( Joker )*

Lead Actress:

1. Scarlett Johansson ( Marriage Story )* 2. Florence Pugh ( Midsommar ) 3. Taylor Russell ( Waves ) 2. Cynthia Erivo ( Harriet ) 3. Saoirse Ronan ( Little Women ) 6. Zhao Tao ( Ash is Purest White ) 7. Olivia Wilde ( A Vigilante ) 8. Noémie Merlant ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) 9. Vicky Knight ( Dirty God ) 10. Awkwafina ( The Farewell ) 4. Charlize Theron ( Bombshell ) -------------------------- Renee Zellweger ( Judy )

Director:

1. Céline Sciamma ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ) 1. Bong Joon Ho ( Parasite )* 2. Sam Mendes ( 1917 ) 4. Lulu Wang ( The Farewell ) 5. Trey Edward Shultz ( Waves ) 6. Greta Gerwig ( Little Women ) 7. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Kathleen Hepburn ( The Body Remembers ) 8. Sarah Daggar-Nickson ( A Vigilante ) -------------------------- Martin Scorsese ( The Irishman ) Quentin Tarantino ( Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ) Todd Phillips ( Joker )

Best Picture:

1. 1917* 2. Parasite 3. Knives Out 4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire 3. Little Women 4. Jojo Rabbit 7. Waves 5. Marriage Story 9. The Lighthouse 10. Pain and Glory -------------------------- The Irishman Ford v Ferrari Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Joker

Predictions for technical categories:

Sound Editing: Oliver Tarney and Rachel Tate ( 1917 )

Sound Mixing: Stuart Wilson ( 1917 )

Film Editing: Michael McCusker and Andrew Buckland ( Ford v Ferrari )

#oscars 2020 #academy awards #remedial awards #oscar predictions #will update when I see more!

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sweetsmellosuccess · 6 years ago

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Sundance: Day 4

Number of Films: 4 Best Movie of the Day: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

The Report: it might be difficult to remember after two years of the circus clown in office now, but a couple of decades ago, we were also in terrible shape in the White House: the Bush/Cheney regime (though actually that should read CHENEY/bush) had gotten us into a pointless war we didn’t need and had the country enter into the “dark side” in order to try to prevent another 9/11 from happening. Included in the litany of horrible, immoral items was the laughably euphemistic “Enhanced Interrogation Technique” deployment, an illegal and utterly reprehensible use of torture on political prisoners. Under Obama, the program, admitted by the CIA to be worthless as an intel-gathering system, was quickly dispatched, but the lingering taint of possible war crimes had lead to a supposedly thorough investigation by the senate. Lead by a young intelligence agent named Dan Jones (played here by Adam Driver), the titular report refers to the final conclusions drawn by the senate sub-committee, but not before the notoriously prickly CIA had done everything they could to suppress it. Scott Z. Burn’s film follows closely the drafting of the report and the many obstacles standing in the way of getting it out to the public, even in heavily redacted form. Burns isn’t going for artistic style points, here, it is straightforward and voluminous in detail in trying to tell an extremely complicated story in a couple of scant hours. In place of visual flair, there is the compelling theatrics of Driver, whose singular delivery, where every word takes on heightened emphasis, helps make dry material a good deal more persuasive. Unlike Spotlight, an equally procedural type of drama, it doesn’t offer the emotional payoff of knowing a thing has been exposed that will change a great many lives. While a version of the report was finally released in the waning years of Obama’s term in office, to date, none of the perpetrators have ever been charged with a crime or received a demotion as a result.

The Farewell: An early buzz-maker at the festival, Lulu Wang‘s autobiographical story, about a Chinese family’s decision to not tell the matriarch of the clan about her terminal cancer condition and instead fake a wedding as a means of getting the whole family back together in China one last time without her knowing, rides an emotionally tricky ride. Our protagonist is Billi (Awkwafina), a twentysomething writer in New York, still very much making her way. She is very close to Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhou), and devastated to have to withhold the prognosis from her lively, opinionated grandmother. As the family all congregate together, including the hapless cousin forced to have the fake wedding with his Japanese girlfriend, the irony becomes more and more palpable. The conceit is like a French farce -- one lie that spins into more and more complexity -- but with much higher emotional stakes. The film plays a lot like a comedy, but with such a backdrop powering it, it treads a remarkably difficult line between the two poles. In the Hollywood remake, Billi would have been given a love interest in China (and there is a moment with a handsome young doctor where you can see precisely where that would begin) to give the film more cushioning, and at the end Nai Nai would have confessed to Billi that she knew “the whole time” but was simply humoring her family, which also would have spared the audience. Notably, Wang does neither of those things, so the emotional crescendo near the ending hits you with full force (although the coda right at the end throws a good deal more confusion into the mix).

The Last Black Man in San Francisco: It works in ways that are difficult to describe. Through pace, tone, and image, Joe Talbot has created something that feels utterly organic and unique. The story concerns a pair of best friends, Jimmie Fails (playing himself) and Mont (Jonathan Majors), growing up together in SF. Jimmy, who skates around the city in a knit cap, dotes daily on a beautiful house in the Golden Gate neighborhood, owned now by an older white couple but used to belong to his family, built piece by piece by his grandfather in the post-war ‘40s. Mont, for his part, is an artist and playwright, taking in the people of the city and transforming them into his own art. When the elderly couple suddenly have to move out, Jimmy and Mont quickly move in, stocking the place with the old, original furniture from storage. It is Jimmy’s fondest wish, he feels a deep kinship with the place, and is genuinely a devoted and caring neighbor. When the house is eventually put on the market, it threatens to disrupt the idyll the friends have created. Through creative use of super slo-motion, and delicate lens work, Talbot‘s film moves mysteriously, but captures the essence of both the characters and the city itself. In his hands, everything becomes a character unto itself, from the house, to a field tall with flowering weeds, to a dock that leads out to a mud flat. The sense of place, and dynamic energy infuses everything we see on screen. A scene towards the end involving one of Mont’s plays, strains credibility a bit, but even there, it’s accounted for honorablyl. It’s the best film I’ve seen so far at this festival, and will almost certainly be among the best I will see this year.

Tomorrow: We start early with The Report; try like hell to jump into The Farewell; check out The Last Black Man in San Francisco; and close it out with Velvet Buzzsaw.

Into the frigid climes and rarefied thin air of the spectacular Utah Mountains, I've arrived in order to document some of the sense and senselessness of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Over the next week, armed with little more than a heavy parka and a bevy of blank reporter's notebooks, I'll endeavor to watch as many movies as I can and report my findings.

#sweet smell of success #ssos #piers marchant #films #movies #sundance #park city #2019 #the last black man in san francisco #the report #the farewell #arkansas democrat gazette

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ferricide · 6 years ago

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Review: Final Fantasy XIII

[originally posted: April 11, 2010] I haven't written a review in a long time. The last review I wrote, in fact, was of Devil May Cry 4, for the Official Xbox Magazine, in 2007. I didn't much like Devil May Cry 4, really. In the way of game journalists of my generation, I gave the game a 7.5 and an even-handed review, because there are things that it did do well. All the same, I was never asked to write another review for the magazine; much later, a staffer told me that someone from management had asked them to stop publishing my work. "Fine! Fuck you, too!" I thought, and then felt a burden lift. I had been reviewing games professionally since 1999 and was tired of it. I have long hinted that I would some day write an expose about what's really wrong with game reviewing, since nobody seems to quite get it right. But by the time I felt ready to do that, I was so bored with the whole business that I couldn't make myself want to. To my surprise, I instead find myself compelled to write a review once again. The game which I will endeavor to review, in a way that I'll make up as I go along, is the most complicated game of 2010: Final Fantasy XIII. * * * Final Fantasy XIII was announced for the PlayStation 3 in 2006, at Square Enix's E3 press conference. As a long time fan of the series who was confounded by its direction at that time -- the gully between Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XII -- I was eager for both a return to form ("form" as a concept roughly equivalent to "more Final Fantasy X" in my mind) and a justification for Sony's yet-to-be-released next generation system. Well, things change. * * * One thing that will make this review dramatically different to any I have ever written is that I will be considering what I learned by reading others' reviews, talking to other players, and generally trying to synthesize the concept of why this game was made the way it was made, not just whether it's any good. To my mind reviewing games in 2010 the old fashioned way is beside the point; as a journalist I recognize my own obsolescence -- the old tools have been made irrelevant by the power of marketing and the cacophony of the internet. Plus it's boring. That's not to promise that will be a review worth reading. I'm going to try, all the same. Final Fantasy XIII was released for the PlayStation 3 on December 17, 2009 by Square Enix Co., Ltd. It was localized into English (and ported to the Xbox 360) and released on March 9, 2010 in the major Western markets by the company's international subsidiaries. This is notable because it reveals so much about the flux of development from the time this game was conceived until it was released. Final Fantasy XIII came out nearly three years too late, by my reckoning. By the time it did come out, one of the only ways it successfully aligned with the market it was released into is that publishing a major game in March isn't, anymore, all that peculiar. Final Fantasy XIII, however, is. In 2008, Square Enix delivered a talk at the Game Developers Conference in which it described the features of its Crystal Tools game engine which powers Final Fantasy XIII -- a talk which a developer friend and fan of the series emphatically described as "terrible" shortly after. Terrible not because the technology is bad; terrible because it took the company so long to step into the technological present. In 2008, Crystal Tools promised to deliver yesterday's features tomorrow. Coincidentally, Final Fantasy XIII was released into the Western market on the second day of GDC 2010. When I review games, I typically insulate myself from the opinions of others. This was a solemn requirement at the heart of reviewing games for EGM, for example. Editor-in-chief Dan Hsu, who was one of my mentors for much of my career as a reviewer, demanded three distinct opinions. That's not as easy at it sounds, and not just because editors are talkative. If you go out there with the wrong score, you're going to get a lashing from the internet; you may well have to justify yourself to the game's publisher; you may even put your job at risk. Consensus is a safe haven. This is part of why reviewing Final Fantasy XIII in April 2010 is amusing: staying isolated from opinions of this game, so polarizing and so widely discussed, is impossible. I've spent the better part of four years anticipating the game more than any other ever released. I've also spent the better part of the last four months marinating in the game and people's reactions to it. I've read, written, and spoken more words about this than any other game in years, and probably any in the foreseeable future. In fact, this may be the last time I can claim authority over any sizable chunk of the mainstream game industry. I didn't think about it that way in the past, but Japanese-developed RPGs have been, since the early 1990s, my passion. The JRPG is my favorite genre. Very, very briefly, it was also the world's: starting in 1997, with the release of Final Fantasy VII, it seemed that the games I loved would finally get their due. I used to have the mentality -- which now feels quite dated -- that I could convince people to give games a shot. I thought that if I could cut right into the heart of a game and explain exactly what made it tick and why that mattered, I could convince people, with only my words, to try something they weren't planning to. While I don't think that's impossible, I think it's an edge case; voracious consumers of games, maybe. Enthuasiasts of a genre, perhaps. Convincing someone to pick up an interesting book, CD, or go to a film is one thing; with games... it's much more difficult, it seems, and it's only getting harder thanks to everyone's shrinking reserves of money and time. One thing I realized over the years is that a large contingent of gamers who were suckered into playing Final Fantasy VII for its groundbreaking cinematics and engrossing story actually weren't that happy about it. They may have enjoyed that experience, but they began to become frustrated by and by, and other games in the genre perplexed and bored them. Many, many people didn't value what I valued in games -- and I don't just mean turn-based combat or pop existentialism. People simply didn't value stepping out of their comfort zone. I just didn't realize how true this was until my comfort zone started to shrink and become more and more irrelevant. It's now well-known that Microsoft approached Activision and Infinity Ward and asked them to deliver Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360's launch, because Halo 3wasn't going to be ready. While that's not the whole of it, it might just be the inflection point where things changed. By 2010, we know the story by heart: Western developers who'd never had access to an audience like this before had the console market hungrily in their sights and, driven by ambition and talent, made bold games that made what had come before look rudimentary. Meanwhile, the reliability of Japan's market and the peculiarity of the way its businesses are run had created somnambulent companies which attracted university graduates with a promise of reliable jobs rather than creative possibilities. Of course, these things are, to an extent, cyclical. It's not over yet. Things are changing. Square Enix is reputed to be a vision-driven company with strong creative minds in charge. Its president, Yoichi Wada, has complained that the staff's creative pursuits delay its titles from shipping on time. The most famous man at the company is Tetsuya Nomura, an illustrator who got famous for creating characters so memorable that it enabled him to get his thumb into the majority of the company's creative output within a decade. On the other hand, Final Fantasy XIII was the company's first real step into the next generation; it's a humongous production designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. For all of these reasons and more, Final Fantasy XIII is, most obviously, a bizarre compromise. In his borderline incomprehensible -- through no fault of his own -- GDC 2010 talk, the game's director Motomu Toriyama described how, over the years, the creative process for developing Final Fantasy titles changed from a collaborative to top-down structure thanks to the workflow demands put on the teams by technology. In the immediate aftermath of the development of Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom, the team bullshitted up some ideas for Final Fantasy VII. But when it came time to produce that game, the decision had been made to move to the PlayStation and deliver a Hollywood-style cinematic experience. Still and all, the game was put together piecemeal -- and if you remember its wild inconsistency of play, it's not a surprise to hear that now. From to snowboarding to defending Fort Condor to performing CPR to motorcycle combat to the Golden Saucer, the game provides arguably too many diversions from its core gameplay. By the time Final Fantasy X rolled around in 2001, said Toriyama, "An impact on experimentation took place. From this [game], scenario had to be fixed first, because of motion and voice [recording]. So each staff person we could not incorporate their comments or opinions, since just a small number of people were working on the story creation... It was a major change in Final Fantasy X." Throw in a platform shift for which the company was totally unprepared, a mandate for visual perfection, and a production team in the hundreds, and Final Fantasy XIII, as it is, is born. Still, I haven't even approached Final Fantasy XIII's greatest and most fundamental sin. * * * "It starts to get good after about 12 hours," I said. "Twelve hours? I can't believe you give that game such a huge by," said Lulu. "It's not a by," I responded, lamely. She turned away. Zak looked at me. "I just know that if he sticks with it..." She shook her head. "The fact that they can rely on that kind of loyalty --" "...if he sticks with it -- I'm not talking to everybody, I'm talking to Zak -- he'll enjoy it." A few moments later: "You're right. It's a by." The biggest sin of Final Fantasy XIII is that the developers assume that once that disc slips into the drive, gamers are commited to seeing the ending credits. The developers assume that everybody wants so much to play this game that they will simply plod through it all. This sin is compounded by Square Enix's obvious, terrifying mandate to make the biggest, most popular Final Fantasy game since VII, and bring gamers into the fold who've never before been interested in the series. And it is complicated by their total misjudgment of the demands of today's audiences after years of increasing sophistication in games. * * * Let's play a game. No, not Final Fantasy XIII. Let's pretend that Final Fantasy XIII came out in December 2007, a year after the launch of the PlayStation 3, much as Final Fantasy X did in 2001 relative to the PlayStation 2's launch. And since we're already enmeshed in this fantastic scenario, let's take another little leap: let's pretend that the Xbox 360 never existed. Boy, Final Fantasy XIII seems pretty fucking excellent now, doesn't it? Yeah, it may not be the best game in the series, but I can't wait to see what these guys are going to do when they really come to grips with this next generation console technology! That's the world this game was made for. There were just some complications... * * * Thanks to Call of Duty, mainstream audiences of unparalleled size are getting used to the production style pioneered by Square Soft in the early '90s. These games are so complicated and huge, somebody thought, we ought to bootstrap a few teams and get them rolling into production simultaneously, so we can have a continuous flow of product for fans. At some point, this production process broke down. By the time of Final Fantasy XII's hideous and unprecedented delay, FF production was critically wounded; it has not recovered. Motomu Toriyama showed one deeply confusing screenshot of Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 2 in his GDC presentation. I've privately been told by someone who'd know that the game was unconventional in a way that the Final Fantasy XIII that was manufactured and shipped to retailers is not. Something happened during the production of the unconventional, deeply flawed Final Fantasy XII to kill experimentation at Square Enix. Something happened during the troubled birth of Crystal Tools to complicate Final Fantasy XIII's production until a group of very intelligent and experienced developers were forced to pare down the design document to what would obviously and flawlessly function. In his GDC talk, the lead game designer of Assassin's Creed II, Patrick Plourde, talked about the production of the first game. Half an hour after he joked that "the Final Fantasy guys are probably the only others who face these problems" -- putting together a 30+ hour game with a team of hundreds, that is -- he explained that a separate team designed and implemented the assassination missions in the original Assassin's Creed. These missions were stapled onto the core game and, though they formed its primary gameplay objectives, they had nothing to do with its core gameplay. Ubisoft Montreal's production processes had been designed to produce different streams of content simultaneously and bolt them together at the end -- a method that was retained but completely rethought for production of its sequel. In a strange coincidence, Motomu Toriyama was sitting next to me during this presentation. * * * Most people who had anything to say about Final Fantasy XIII shortly after its release were those who were repulsed by early design decisions the team made about the game. And while I don't think production realities excuse a shitty game, they sure do explain it. If one thing's clear, it's that production ramped up on Final Fantasy XIII before there was a clear plan on how things were going to be bolted together. As Tim Rogers points out in his review, "A producer of Final Fantasy XIII explains that there was 'enough discarded content' from Final Fantasy XIII to make a whole other game. The 'content' in question is mainly levels -- game-play areas." He draws the correct inference: the production process for this game was so deeply flawed that artists were being paid to create content that the core creative team was unsure if it would have any use for, just to make them do something. As I explained to Zak and Lulu, the really bad part of Final Fantasy XIII is not, as many have said, the first two hours, in which you have no meaningful choices in combat and cannot earn Crystogen Points and so cannot level your characters. The worst part is also not the next five hours of the game, which establishes the core of the game's narrative premise and slowly and surely delivers its gameplay systems one after the other -- the tutorial. No, the worst part is between hours 8 to 14. This is the most vapid and superfluous part of Final Fantasy XIII. This is the painful and tedious point where the game has firmly established its core gameplay, its cast of characters, and then... refuses to give over. From the second half of the Gapra Whitewood to the end of the Sunleth Waterscape, Final Fantasy XIII is a tedious mess made by people who clearly don't understand what they're supposed to be doing. Here's my quick guide into making Final Fantasy XIII not suck shit. It'll sound pretty easy when I explain it. Immediately institute gameplay. Without changing the scenario at all, allow players to experiment with special abilities and raise levels in the Crystarium -- even allow them to raise the levels of the NORA troops Gadot and Lebreau, though the player won't ever use them again (notably, in the release, Gadot and Lebreau's HP are listed as ??? instead of numbers because they're NPCs.) Nobody will resent wasting this effort; certainly no more than they did being held back from experiencing gameplay for the first two hours of the game. By the time the party assembles for the battle against the Pulse Fal'Cie in the Pulse Vestige, they should have earned a few abilities in the Crystarium. (If there's one thing this game is spookily good at, it's balancing the distribution of CP as it effects gaining abilities and fighting boss battles, so I don't doubt the team could balance this well.) You don't have to unlock much, but just enough to give the player a sense he is making decisions: enough for advanced players to know what's in store and little enough for novices to stick with it. Remember, the novice audience wants to learn how to play your game. As the party escapes to Lake Bresha, lay on the tutorials, just as you did. There's a debate to be had here about teaching the player how to play the game by presenting challenges that require him to exercise the options at his fingertips -- remember that battle in Palumpolum which forces you to play the Sentinel role? like that -- but let's just assume we're not changing things that drastically. It'll work. The Vile Peaks proceed as normal, though perhaps the roles of some of the characters have to be tweaked. But here's the crucial difference. By the end of the Vile Peaks, the entire Crystarium must be unlocked and available to players. You have to be done with your lessons approximately... now. There's time for introductions to more advanced gameplay later, but the core: we're done. Here comes a tough part. Narratively, I don't see a way around having Hope and Lightning come to their own understanding in the Whitewood as Sazh and Vanille later do in the Sunleth Waterscape and Nautlius. A mix of cutscenes, structural changes, and judicious and much-needed cutting would have to happen here to make the game tolerable and well-paced. Get players to Palumpolum as fast as you can, and once the six party members gather in Hope's apartment for the game's first real climax, you've just delivered an adventuring party that will never be split up again. If you've balked at my earlier suggestion to unlock the Crystarium fully, now's when you really have to do it. You will never again force the party formation to follow the whims of the plot; that was annoying enough in the 16-bit days in what I would consider the most irritating game in the series, Final Fantasy VI, and it's excruciating now that we know other games actually give us a credible illusion of control. After Palumpolum, Palmecia. And after Palmecia, Gran Pulse. And in Gran Pulse, which we should get to much sooner, something besides mark hunts. "Something", in fact, like the second half of the game. "The answer is staring them right in the face. Gran Pulse should have been the World of Ruin. What were they thinking?" I said this out loud. It's very likely nobody else was in the room. * * * Let's talk core gameplay mechanics. I theorized, in December, that at some point there was a meeting in Square Enix's Shinjuku headquarters where things were decided that altered the course of Final Fantasy XIII's development profoundly. I'm not wrong, of course -- there were probably dozens of such meetings. But let's visualize this for a minute. Yoshinori Kitase, Motomu Toriyama, Yuji Abe, and the rest of the team is sitting at a conference table. The light is bright and fluorescent. There's stale coffee, 330 ml bottles of French spring water, and, since this is Japan, there might even be cigarette smoke hanging in the air. Production on Final Fantasy XIII is not, to put it lightly, going as planned. Crystal Tools is nothing like done. In the back of his mind, one of the men is wishing -- for not the first time and not the last -- that Matsuno's fucking team had got Final Fantasy XII out the door in time for FF13 to hit the PlayStation 2 before its market died, and that Crystal Tools could have been sorted out before production had begun on a next-generation title. Toriyama looks at Kitase. Kitase looks at Toriyama. "What are we going to do?" somebody asks. I tried, and failed, to write this scene with drama and snappy dialogue, but let's be fair: this is a Japanese office. One of the junior planners walks around the room handing out sheafs of stapled A4 paper to everybody. This is what they're going to do. They've identified the strenghts of the series: its characters and story, courtesy of Nomura, Toriyama, Kazushige Nojima and others; its battles -- thank Toshiro Tsuchida and Yuji Abe; its beautiful environments, Isamu Kamikokuryo; and the character leveling system, the Crystarium. Everything else is expendable -- it either has to be tied into the plot, or has to serve the purpose of getting this game out the door. When I talk about Final Fantasy XIII's battle system, I get excited. People can hear the excitement in my voice, and they get interested. I have actually seen this happen in real life. That's a measure not just of how much I care about the game and the series, but my genuine admiration for the level of execution of this absolutely core facet of the gameplay. Their plan almost worked -- or perhaps could have worked -- but it didn't. It fails in some very fundamental ways that mostly have to do with the developers' control and complacency. * * * Time for pure gameplay complaining: the Crystarium stinks. Let's do some comparing and contrasting and background here, since we might as well. At some point -- I guess Final Fantasy X -- the developers at Square Enix decided that traditional experience points / earn a level-style leveling systems were passe. I don't in the least bit blame them, since how you grow your characters is one of the best gameplay aspects of an RPG when handled correctly. The Sphere Grid, which was Final Fantasy X's stab at delivering that sort of gameplay, was compulsively addictive to me. It was essentially linear for a good portion of the game, but starting not terribly far in, you'd be forced to make decisions about what to unlock when, and how to balance your party, and soon after that what secondary sets of abilities you wanted your characters to develop. One of my absolute fondest memories of FFX is running in circles in Zanarkand raising levels for an entire day. Final Fantasy XII's leveling system, the License Board, is a pathetic thing, paltry and simple, trivial to exploit. It encourages you -- or at least it did me -- to rob your characters of any distinct identity and instead gravitate to what delivers the best advantage: my party were carbon copies of one another by the end of the game; bizarre hybrid mage-warriors with no trace of specialty nor identity. It's worth noting that when the game was rereleased in Japan, this entire gameplay mechanic was deleted and replaced with something new (called the Intenational Zodiac Job System, fuck knows what that is. I certainly don't care.) The Crystarium is not that bad. But it is not very good. I think one of the real flaws with it is that it's split into six: each role has its own distinct set of bonuses and abilities, because each role has to be defined within the context of the game's Paradigm System battles, which are in fact quite excellent. Unfortunately in concert with this, there's no freedom of movement, and your only decision-making process is which of the jobs you wish to raise first. But that complaint is really irrelevant compared to the real flaws in the system. The Crystarium is divided into levels, and levels are locked. They are not locked, as would be logical, until you complete one; they are locked until the arbitrary point in the game -- always after a boss battle -- where the developers deign to unlock the next stage of Crystarium growth. Frustratingly, too, in my experience, the game perfectly metes out experience points throughout so that you're just about ready to hit the next level of the Crystarium by the time you get it. This is one of the many things about playing Final Fantasy XIII that makes you feel like a rat in a maze. There's an ominous awareness of someone in control, just out of your field of view... And there is a severe and obvious flaw with this: gamers don't all enjoy games the way the developers intend them to. Gamers don't all enjoy games in the order developers intend them to. And gamers do not all enjoy games at the speed which developers intend them to. This is the first game in the series which does not allow for this, and that is a severe flaw. There are six potential roles for each character (pretentiously renamed in the U.S. version to Commando, Ravager, Medic, Saboteur, Synergist, and Sentinel from the readily comprehensible Attacker, Blaster, Healer, Jammer, Enhancer, and Defender.) However, for the first two thirds of the game, you aren't allowed to access any but the three the which the development team assigned to each character at its outset. The CP (Crystogen Points, or experience points) you earn are only enough to really concentrate on the three jobs you are given anyway. This, in fact, holds true for the whole game, including the last boss, unless you do a tremendously unpalatable amount of grinding, even when you have access to the other three jobs. This sucks out all player choice once again. Since you effectively can't raise optional jobs, since the CP costs are so astronomical, you can't really experiment with new party builds without swapping characters in and out to form the party you want. All I accomplished by trying to make Lightning a Saboteur was putting her behind Hope in primary job progress, and I quickly abandoned the idea. I got a slight benefit out of making Fang a low-level Synergist, but since you also only have six Paradigm slots this became irrelevant, too. There just wasn't room for that Paradigm. The worst aspect of the Crystarium, though, is that not every character gets every ability in every job. For example, as a Synergist, Fang gets Shellga and Protectga. I assumed Hope would earn access to these abilities soon after -- when his next Crystarium level unlocked. Nope. He never gets them -- ever -- and Synergist is one of his three primary jobs. Worse yet is that without consulting a FAQ, you'd never know this, so it's impossible to plan ahead for the ideal party without researching online -- and personally I like to avoid FAQs as much as I can. In the end, the Crystarium is just a linear leveling system in a Sphere Grid disguise, and it's probably my personal biggest disappointment with the game. Tim compared the game to busywork in his review, and it's not wrong -- by removing meaningful choice, the Crystarium has transitioned from a thoughtful system into something akin to stuffing envelopes. * * * All the same, when I look at the game, I'm more sympathetic to many of the mistakes the developers made because I came to the realization that they are tremendously determined to get players through this game, fully understanding its gameplay. And I also laud them for turning up the challenge at the point at which they believe players should fully understand it -- which is one of the most satisfying sections of the game, if not the most satisfying section -- the Battleship Palamecia. It's obvious that this is why the game is so drawn out, and derisively (though somewhat fairly) called a neverending tutorial by gamers. Gamers, for one reason and another, don't like to be condescended to, and this was a miscalculation on Square Enix's part. But it's not so simple as that. This isn't just about teaching novices to play the game. It's about making sure everybody gets it. Really, really gets it. This is necessary because with previous titles in the series, it was fully possible to get to the very end without understanding their gameplay. Not just possible, in fact, but likely. The most obvious culprit here is Final Fantasy VIII -- the game is complicated, more than a little broken, very abstract, and full of gameplay loopholes. On reading what people have had to say about it over the last 11+ years, I have certainly realized that I -- no newbie to Final Fantasy or RPGs in general by that point -- got to the end of the game without really understanding its gameplay in more than the most rudimentary way, and I was hardly alone in that. In fact, I never actually beat Final Fantasy VIII. I got to the last boss, but I never did defeat her. Let's go back to that word "abstract". When it comes to core gameplay, RPGs are the most abstracted of all established game genres. In a shooter, you shoot someone; he dies. You physically move the aiming reticule over a target; you pull a shoulder button like a trigger. It's simple. Game developers are forever adding abstract, complex gameplay elements to titles of all genres, because the kinds of people who buy Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games enjoy these abstractions. Only RPGs are build their foundations on them. Even relatively simple concepts like "equipment" tend to be so complicated by either special abilities or innumerable choices that they lose a great deal of their concreteness. There's the famous example, of course, of Dean Takahashi's review of the original Mass Effect -- in which he forgot to level Shepard. Dean is not a stupid guy. At this year's GDC, Peter Molyneux said that Microsoft research indicated that more than 60 percent of the Fable audience understood less than 50 percent of the series' gameplay. Fable is not as popular as Final Fantasy. The answer that BioWare and Lionhead have posed to these problems is to streamline the everliving fuck out of Mass Effect 2 and Fable III. The Final Fantasy XIIIdevelopment team tried that, too. However, where the paths diverge is that the Western teams have gone to great lengths to make their gameplay systems concrete. ME2 is a full-on shooter; Fable III doesn't have levels anymore: you gain followers, and that power is reflected visually by your character. Instead of moving towards action or something else easier to understand, Final Fantasy XIII completely retained an abstracted, command input-based tactical battle system with text and gauges and jobs and hit points -- they just tried to teach players to use it. As a hardcore gamer who loves abstraction (and in particular loves this battle system) I sure do appreciate it. But it's easy to argue that Square Enix is going both against the grain of the collective wisdom of the industry and also working against the mainstream audience they want to cultivate. One solution -- and I'm not even sure this is precisely intentional on BioWare's part, but if it is, it's genius -- would be to split Final Fantasy into hardcore nerdy and open and casual variants, in the same way Mass Effect and Dragon Age compliment each other. No significant number of BioWare otaku who want the D&D-inspired bollocks of Dragon Age's gameplay resent Mass Effect 2's simplicity. And they will buy every scrap of Dragon Age content thrown to them, and most of them will buy Mass Effect, too. Like i said, if this is intentional, it's pure fucking genius and probably what I most respect BioWare for right now. I've talked to a guy online -- a smart enough guy, an adult and avid gamer, who got to the end of Final Fantasy X without understanding the Sphere Grid and couldn't beat Sin. Despite my problems with FFVIII, this never occurred to me, simply because I understood FFX so well. And, more troublingly, I know a guy online who's gotten past the point in Final Fantasy XIII where the developers assume you understand the game and just throw everything at you -- far past, with the help of strategy guides and a level of perseverence that's difficult to credit but so refreshing to see -- and I'm not quite sure he really gets it. He certainly can't reliably execute it. Because of the tight control over the Crystarium he can't grind his way out of tight spots; because of the developers' faith that their style of teaching players how to play is adequate, he has to resort to following online strategies. Even the official guide isn't enough. So as much as I like the impetus of teaching novices to understand Final Fantasy -- because how else are you going to convert them into fans like me who live, breathe, and love JRPG gameplay? -- I don't think Square Enix pulled it off. And worse, they alienated a good chunk of their existing audience by making it sit through kindergarten, or as I like to call the beginning of the game, Disc 0 (think about this in PlayStation 1 FF terms and you'll get it.) * * * So while I'm on the subject of gameplay, let's keep this going and talk about the fucking battle system already. The best -- if not most appealing -- way I can think of to explain the Paradigm Shift system is that, in a regular FF battle system, you were the grill team in the McDonalds kitchen, all working to produce the meal. In FF13, you've been promoted to manager. Rather than making the same, repetitive individual decisions moment-to-moment, you control the overall flow of battle via the Paradigms. Once the system gets cooking, you get the same intense and strategic push-pull of a traditional turn-based battle system in maybe one fifth of the time. So each Paradigm you set up, to back up a bit, is a party build. Each character has three jobs (let's say three, because as I discussed, five or six is a lie and even four is pushing it.) Your job is to switch between Paradigms which offer the most effective mix of jobs (and thus, skills) for current battle situations -- you become the mini-general, flipping your troops' jobs around. And it's not just that you must tell them what (generally) to do; you also have to be mindful of how their skills compliment each other. That's before you take into account enemy behavior. To say that the battle system is challenging and addictive would be an understatement -- this is the compulsive and most highly polished aspect of the gameplay, bar-none. The problem is that it doesn't fucking get that way until the aforementioned Palamecia section... like 15 hours into the game. Sigh. But once it kicks in, it's fucking kicked in for the whole rest of the game; smacking the everloving shit out of the last boss was a highly amusing pleasure. There's also the extremely fast pace to laud, and also the strange but addictive process of Staggering enemies. Until you Stagger an enemy, damage is negligible, and you need to hit them with both physical attacks and magic to make them Stagger. This really is the way in which the Paradigm Shift system is unified with basic damage dealing, you see, and the icing is the game's maniacal reliance on buffs and debuffs later on to add another layer of tension and make your finger itch on the L1 button as you shift Paradigms compulsively. This is the good shit. This is where it's at. And when you Stagger (or Break) -- I definitely prefer the Japanese version's "Break", it's more forceful, more aesthetically appealing -- So when you BREAK an enemy, there's a skill called Launch that the Commando class gets which throws the fucker up into the air. When the enemy is up in the air it can't do jack shit -- it can't attack you at all, and just wriggles helplessly. This is so super fucking satsifying that I can't even articulate it. It makes me giggle. And to answer one of the questions Tim raised in his review of the game, yes, it's inherently satisfying to see giant fucking numbers (representing damage) pop out of enemies when you hit them. Of this I have not the least shred of doubt. * * * Let's talk about the whole NO TOWNS thing. The game does not fucking need towns. Towns would not solve this game's problems. The whole towns thing reminds me of people talking about Steven Spielberg's A.I. A lot of people didn't like the saccharine ending of the film and said that the movie should have ended with David staring at the Blue Angel, implicitly forever. No -- that would have just been a different shitty ending. In the same vein, stapling some classic-style towns to Final Fantasy XIII would not solve anything. What people who are asking for towns are asking for are two things, and one of them is valid and one of them is bullshit. 1. Give me what the series has always had, because I am old and I fear change. (Bullshit.) 2. Give me something that would improve the game's pacing, and add agency and variety. (Correct.) Let me be clear: I have no interest in seeing towns come back to Final Fantasy as towns were once executed in the series, that's for sure. But something needs to come in -- a solution must be devised. The bit where you chase the Chocobo chick through Nautilus: that was simple, and stupid, but fun. The way I much more miss towns, in all honesty, is that so many of the cutscenes in this game feature people just stopping in some corridor in some dungeon and having a conversation, and the context they do this in has absolutely nothing to do with that conversation, and it starts to feel extremely false and disconnected from any sense of reality. This is to be avoided scrupulously in future games in the series, in my opinion, and one of the ways to do that is to make sure that the important story sequences are context-driven. And to have context-driven story you need, well, a fucking context. Obviously. Things like towns are meaningful. Giant blue glowing forests, while totally fucking awesome for smacking the shit out of rampaging biological experiments in, are not so great for having a conversation about your dead mom. * * * One particularly notable object lesson in this is the segment of the game which takes place in Palumpolum. The game goes from romps through attractive but irrelevant video game backdrops to a struggle against fate in a city populated by civilians. Context comes flooding in to illustrate concepts that were so recently abstract. There's an army, there are buildings that make sense, there's the whole scenario with Hope's dad in his apartment. Things just gel fabulously here in a way that totally makes sense, and stands in stark contrast to the last several hours of the game. The Hanging Edge. Gapra Whitewood. Sunleth Waterscape. No. Vile Peaks. The Fifth Ark. Kind of; good enough. Nautilus. Palumpolum. The Palmecia. Eden. Yes. * * * Let's talk about the characters and story. The Final Fantasy series has been pretty hit or miss when it comes to antagonists. This game is pretty much a miss. It's really not until the last fucking battle that you begin to get a real understanding for what actually drives the antagonist, who is an Old Man In A Dress, the Fantasy Pope -- which is a lazy cliche, while I'm complaining -- to push your party around, try to kill them, et cetera. This is what I like to call a Big Fucking Mistake. Until then, you're confronted with the fact that he's just a floating asshole who pushes you around and lies to you. It's easy to see why the characters dislike him, but as the player, it's not so easy to feel strongly about it. Also he's a big stupid monster / god thing, really, it turns out, of course. And I found this particularly boring because, oddly enough, the real world's Evil Old Man In A Dress has been in the news a lot lately. And he has been implicated in multiple coverups involving child molesters. And while the whole complicated tale is heartbraking and infuriating, it's also a human story, one that has real heft and weight: I'm more interested in taking my band of adventurers to Rome and knocking Cardinal Ratfucker out of his Prada loafers with a hail of Blizzagas than spitting on Primarch Dysley, FF13's antagonist. Think about that rich and complicated story of venality, ambition, insensitivity, and arrogance and compare it with what motivates FF13's Pope, which is "I'm a god, but I don't like being a god that much." Right. That said, stories of gods pushing humans around don't have to suck. I mean, we have the whole pantheons of Greek and Norse mythologies, and those are just the ones I am immediately familiar with as a white nerd. Those are some fucking interesting gods. And beyond that I can think of examples from fantasy like Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series, or Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, or Diana Wynne Jones, or Neil Gaiman. These gods have many of the same qualities of the Fal'Cie -- aloof, manipulative -- but they're used effectively. That's because the action of the story rests on the decisions of the people, even when the gods command; FF13 does, to its credit, try to do that, too, but it doesn't come together until the end. Let's detour quickly into "Fal'Cie." We already have a word for gods, and it's "gods". Bad fantasy overuses superflous terminology like Fal'Cie that obscures both the meaning and, to my mind, seriousness of its story, and this is a prime offender. I have a theory that Japanese people are more willing to accept bullshit katakana terminology because their language is full of it -- bear in mind that everyday concepts like Personal Computer and Digital Camera and Internet and Sony PlayStation are all made up fantasy words to the Japanese, more or less, and it seems easier to understand why their games are full of them. Then again Dragon Age has shit like the Grey Wardens and (gag) Darkspawn, which sound just as bad to me. It's a problem. Fantasy people: restrain thyselves. One of the really frustrating things about this game is another aspect of the Disc 0 problem I alluded to earlier. It really, really extends to the development of the characters. Plenty of people I've talked to (aka The Whole of the Internets) really hate Snow, Hope, and Vanille. I do not hate them. But I can understand it, because for the first chunk of the game, they are boring do-nothing characters. Contrast the Sazh who stumbles around the Hanging Edge with the one who talks about his son, Dahj, in Sunleth Waterscape and Nautilus. In my opinion, Hope's problems make sense, and he begins to speak and act intelligently and with conviction earlier on. But Vanille is in a way the linchpin of the plot, or many of its mysteries, and you have no bloody idea until way too far into the game. There's a reason she's narrating the thing, folks. Snow, well... Snow can't really get into gear until he and Hope have it out, and thanks to the game's shitty pacing, that just takes far too long. Someone I know said "the plot seems like it's always an hour away from getting good", and that's apt. I've also heard it said that the text Datalog entries add necessary details to flesh out what's going on -- and that's true not in terms of understanding events (I had no problems) but it's very true in terms of shading. In the end, I'm not wild about the cast. They're not as sympathetic as the Final Fantasy X crew, somehow. I felt for them, but not strongly. I think the context problem I wrote about -- Talking In Dungeons -- and the boring antagonist help screw them up. The lack of a real focused main character (aka Final Fantasy VI-itis) is also a problem. Lightning never comes to life as a character -- she's an idea of a character, a representation, a simulacrum. She's fascinating to watch in motion and she spits out some great lines -- love her attitude -- but there's no her. Sazh, on the other hand, is dependable and sympathetic, and one of the only in the party capable of surprising you with his actions. How in the fuck did Japan deliver the one of the first truly rounded and sympathetic black characters in a game (and deliver him with a Chocobo chick in his afro, and make it work?) Talk about an unexpected triumph. Snow is a stock character. Snow is not a badly-written version of that character, but he does not exceed those bounds enough to become fully three-dimensional. He's important to the story, though, and I forgive it. He's kind of like this game's Wakka, with a role that exceeds his depth, yet somehow a less interesting conflict to resolve within himself. I had thought Hope was going to be a Shinji-type character, but he's really not, or not for very long. He's a believable adolescent; his background really comes into play for his character in ways I didn't anticipate (observations easier for me to make, perhaps, because he's the one I identified with most.) You can tell he's well-educated though he never really talks about it much; later you see he's a child of privelege who grew up in the big city, and his attitude and demeanor makes sense. Characterization Success Get! He acts in ways that are logical, and if anybody sells the whole Fal'Cie/l'Cie thing, in the whole cast, it's Hope -- through both his reactions to the situation and his knowledge. Vanille... is a conundrum. First up, she's the worst character design Nomura has shit out since... Irvine Kinneas? Long time. Part of that's a cultural Japan/America thing, and part of that's a borderline misogynist "girl skipping around in a short dress is tough to take seriously" thing, let's face it... but part of it is that she has just a hideous outfit and ridiculous hair. Even Hope looks like he's dressed to walk around a bit. She... well, it'd be an okay outfit for a summertime date. If she didn't expect to have to sit down and get hit in the back with that... beaded... thing, that is. When her role in the story becomes apparent, though, suddenly she's really interesting. I can't think of another character in an RPG who lies so much, and for such believable reasons. Usually RPG characters only lie because they're Secretly On The Other Side or whatever -- normal fantasy turncoat bullshit. That's it. You know, totally unlike real people, who lie all the time with both good and bad intentions. Not so, Vanille. And Fang is kind of dumb but she looks awesome, is gorgeous, kicks ass, has a rockin' Australian accent, and is just generally too much fun to not love. And you can easily pretend she's a lesbian. The game's real strength, though, is the dynamics of the characters -- their interactions. Lightning and Hope. Hope and Snow. Sazh and Vanille. Vanille and Fang. Japanese writers seem to have a facility for group dynamics and this frequently shines through in FF13's story more than the actual plot point that's occuring. * * * Chris Hecker has warned us that if we're not careful, games will become like comic books. What he's talking about is cultural ghettoization. I think we're already there -- we're just there at a profitable scale for a wide audience, unlike comics. And in many cases we're at an even bigger disadvantage -- it's much more challenging, and at times impossible, to step out of your preferred genres and either enjoy or comprehend the games. The FF13 solution, as I already outlined, was to teach people to enjoy it. Sure, Square Enix was less than fully successful there (though the guy who I spoke about who's struggling loved the game so much -- his first JRPG ever -- that he kept at it, and has pushed through the points where he was stuck, and even crossed over into JRPG fan territory by buying the CD soundtrack!) But I digress. My brain has been programmed by long exposure to love the JRPG genre. The experience of playing genre-based games is to gradually understand them more. As long as the games are good, your accumulated knowledge makes them more enjoyable. Hell, even mediocre games in a genre that you like and understand tend to be somewhat entertaining, because they lightly caress those synapses. Your decisions are driven by your tastes, but your tastes are reinforced by repeated exposure, until you start to think about buying games you think look terrible because they have good aspects -- for example, Eternal Sonata, which I though about buying I don't know how many times before I finally gave up on the idea. Its adorable vapidity repulsed me too much to sit through just to experience a battle system which looks pretty nifty. One thing I love most about the JRPG genre is its visual panache, and one thing that the deveopers of Final Fantasy XIII prioritized beyond perhaps all else is delivering those visuals. They are stunning. The character animations in battle and exploration are excellent, the scenes burst with detail, the environments are eye-catching and complex and unexpected. The amount of art generated for this game is nuts -- especially because that's the most expensive part of current generation game production. When I saw Lake Bresha for the first time in December, I said -- out loud -- "this is why I bought a PlayStation 3" and I was not kidding. There was my $600, three years later, right there. When I had the chance to speak to him, I even brought Lake Bresha up with Toriyama, and here's what he said: That body of water you were mentioning is crystallized, and technically it's very difficult to create something that's basically half see-through to bring that frozen effect. So it's not only that artistic vision, but it's also providing that technical expertise to create that; and that's something that really sets us apart from other developers. Other developers I don't think can really create that. You know what? It sounds arrogant, but the blend of techniques, aesthetics, and Japanese orientation to detail represented by Final Fantasy XIII is unmatched this generation. This game is a visual masterpiece. Sure, it's not subtle; The Lost Guardian is going to be more refined. But FF13 can encompass so much about what's great about current generation visuals in one game: it brings in elements of all genres and all aesthetics and blends them together and makes them work, stunningly, and in realtime. And that was something I could always fall back on and enjoy, because it's something I love. And that's what being a genre fan means. Tragically, so much of the most beautiful, exciting content is saved for late in the game. The developers just presume you'll get to Gran Pulse and see its impressive vistas. What if you get bored and sell the game before then? I don't think that thought crossed anybody's mind. That. Is. Fucking. Nuts. The same goes for the game's soundtrack: Masahi Hamauzu, long relegated to Square's B-titles, does a fantastic job here. Yes, it hews close to the aesthetics that have been long established in the genre. A friend of mine, whose music taste I respect a great deal, called it terrible. I got really annoyed. But it's hard to see something like this the way he might: not as a fan of JRPG soundtracks, but as a fan of music. I actually have plenty I could say about the topic in its defense, but that's for another time: it's enough for me to put out that, in another aspect of its conventionality, this game excels. * * * Though all games don't feature strong narrative elements, I think it might be true that games are a unique medium because they are both complex software systems and content-driven media. Together, they forge a context. It's an important tenet of fantasy writing to be embroiled in worldbuilding, of course, but games literally build the worlds they describe. One of the problems that complicates both creating and reviewing games is that they are both software and media. To create software is to create function; to create media is to create feeling. The place where things get interesting is in where these two aims, which don't have a hell of a lot to do with each other, intersect. When they diverge too obviously, pain lies. In a narrative-driven game, both the story-related events and the gameplay systems are expected to come together -- and when it works, this combination is more satisfying than either element would be alone. This dual strength allows you to forgive the flaws. Though game stories are routinely, and not unfairly, criticized for the fact that they would be dissatisfying as a linear narrative (say, a movie) I also think it's valid, and I feel comfortable saying, that the intersection point is what allows games to become more than the sum of their parts. I fully believe this. Games are satisfying because they are a synthesis. They may rountely be a clumsy synthesis in 2010, but their success is still built on this. This is not an argument against games striving to improve both in narrative and play contexts, but it explains, to me at least, my immense satisfaction with flawed experiences and failed experiments. By the time you put it to bed, Final Fantasy XIII proves both that its story is functional and its gameplay is sound. But unfortunately there is a continuous shifting and even breakdown of forged context for a great deal of the adventure. What it's trying to accomplish keeps changing. The game has something like an act structure -- not as most narrative media does because the characters make decisions that propel them forward, but because it's assembled from parts and the seams are visible. The hand of the creators is all too evident in this work, and this is even worse than it could be because it's clear the hand is shaking. And that brings us back to the fundamental problem with FF13, and, finally, to the end of this text. The team have erred seriously in their assumption that players will simply, left with no other option, like the game. Their assumption is that players will, by the end, understand the game; their assumption that, in doing so, players will inevitably care about the game's content. It always comes back to that, in every facet. I would argue that it would be ridiculous to assume someone who doesn't like what Final Fantasy has to offer should or could be catered to by a Final Fantasy title. I can't play Madden just to enjoy what it does well despite a near-total lack of interest or understanding of football. I will never develop an appreciation for Halomultiplayer, even if I can understand what makes it so compelling to so many. I don't really care to try, frankly. That attitude, which I think is common, is an important part of what makes games a tough medium to create in. Even if you allow, as you should, that the game is made for an audience that could potentially enjoy it, Final Fantasy XIII takes this assumption too much to heart, and in doing so severely tries the patience and, some would say, insults the intelligence of its audience. That is a profoundly dangerous place to go and a precipice the developers absolutely must back away from. Final Fantasy XIII For PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Released: March 9, 2010 Publisher: Square Enix Developer: Square Enix Three stars out of five

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