#playing the clichéd over familiar american

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John Coltrane's improvisation style analysis (sheet music incl.)

John Coltrane's improvisation style analysis (sheet music incl.)John Coltrane - I Want To Talk About You (LIVE improvisation) Best Sheet Music download from our Library.Conclusion Please, subscribe to our Library. Thank you!

John Coltrane's improvisation style analysis (sheet music incl.)

John Coltrane - I Want To Talk About You (LIVE improvisation) https://youtu.be/ADPm-3JMbwo Pattern in melodic improvisation and harmonic progression in the music of John Coltrane. John Coltrane (1926-1947) was a leading African-American jazz musician, performing mainly on tenor and soprano saxophones. Coltrane'’s music is renowned for its fiery creativity and the saxophonists visceral approach. This uninhibited style has led some listeners to be dismissive of his style, considering his note choice to be random and meaningless. This is particularly true of his more unhinged performances, such as the seminal free jazz album ‘Ascension’ and the cadenza which follows his performance of "‘I Want to Talk about You"’ on the album ‘Live at Birdland’. The words of Associate Editor of prominent jazz publication Downbeat, John Tynan, who stated (Down Beat Magazine,) on listening to a 1961 performance of the saxophonist, "that ‘ listened to a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend exemplified by those foremost proponents of what is termed avant-garde music" exemplify this trend. Coltrane'’s motivation for playing these kinds of free cadenzas is touched upon in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, where it is stated that in pieces such as Giant Steps, Coltrane, by seeking to escape harmonic clichés…had inadvertently created a one dimensional improvisatory style. In the late 1950’s, he pursued two alternative directions. First, his expanding technique enabled him to play what the critic Ira Gitler called ‘sheets of sound’. It is these ‘sheets of sound’ that can be heard clearly in the cadenza to I Want to Talk About You. Furthermore, Barry Kernfeld comments that ‘such flurries….... disguised his excessive reiteration of formulae.’ By revealing Coltrane’'s techniques, we think we may inspire many modern Jazz improvisers and musicians. Coltrane's cadences

If we analyze the above section in depth, it is possible to see it as implying a II-V-I cadence typical of the jazz idiom, one that Coltrane would have been very familiar with. An example of such a cadence would be the Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7 that comes in the last 4 bars of a conventional jazz 12 bar blues in C major. This extract is to some degree a pastiche of the clichéd jazz ‘lick’ shown below, which is often played over a II-V-I cadence.

Particularly from bar 5 in Coltrane’'s phrase, we see the guide tone of F# (implying the chord of G minor with a major 7th) descend to an F (implying G minor with a lowered 7th) and then to an E (forming the 3rd of C7). Fig. 3 above indicates these common guide-tones with arrows. A scale that jazz musicians commonly use over dominant seventh chords is the altered scale’. This scale is a mode of the melodic minor scale, and is formed by starting on the leading note of that scale.

Over a tonality of G7, this scale emphasizes all the notes that are outside the conventional sound of the chord, and so is typical of harmonically complex jazz. In How to Comp, Hal Crook describes this effect as altered tensions (Hal Crook, How to Comp, (Advance Music, 1995) p.17). Notably, the 3rd (B) and 7th (F) are not altered, as this would too drastically change the function of the chord. In addition to playing the scale linearly, one can also derive a number of shapes and patterns from it. Just as we can derive F and G major triads from the C major scale, we can derive C# and D# major triads from the G altered scale. Below, we see how both Ab and Bb(A#) minor triads are also built into the altered scale.

It is the minor triad that is built on the b2 of the scale that Coltrane uses in this extract.

Here we see, in the context of a C dominant seventh chord, a C# minor triad. This is a clear indication of Coltrane deriving the minor triad shape from the C altered scale. We can see many examples of Coltrane superimposing harmony over existing chord changes outside this cadenza. Coltrane will often use triadic or arpeggaic constructions as these are often the clearest ways to describe harmony. An example might be bars 9-12 of the saxophonists solo on Blue Train from the album of the same name. Blue Train, as its name suggests, is a 12 bar-blues in the key of Eb. Therefore, the last 4 bars of each 12 bar chorus contain a II-V-I cadence in the key of Eb. In his solo, Coltrane does not stick rigidly to the chords of Fm7 - Bb 7 - Eb 7, but instead implies contrasting harmony over the top.

The key section is shown with the square brackets. In this section, Coltrane is not using the altered scale over the C7 chord, as the F natural used in the line does not fit into that scale.

Instead, it appears that Coltrane is implying a minor plagal cadence over the chord changes. Since a plagal cadence is the resolution from chord IV to chord I, a minor plagal cadence is the resolution from chord IV minor to chord I. In this case, that resolution is from the clear Bb minor shape indicated by the square brackets to the F natural that is the first note of the next bar. This example demonstrates that Coltrane was not limited to altered scale vocabulary in his harmonic language. Repeating Motifs In the cadenza, Coltrane does repeat certain ideas that demonstrate that his improvisation is to some degree based on things that he has assimilated and practiced rather than being completely wild and free. One such motif is heard twice, once at (06:16) and again at (06:24).

If we assume that this pattern is derived from a diatonic scale or mode, there are several possible harmonic interpretations of it. The one I thought of at first was that it could imply the tonality of G Lydian.

Similarly, it could be descriptive of the church modes of D. On the other hand, the notes of the motif fit into the scale of E melodic minor.

These and other interpretations are possible, and nobody can definitely state what Coltrane was thinking. However, Mornington Lockett has suggested that the motif could imply several of the altered tensions over the chord of Eb 7. All the notes of the motif fit into the Eb altered scale. Remember that the altered scale is the same as the melodic minor scale a semitone up, and so just as the motif fits into E melodic minor scale, it fits into the Eb altered scale

This is possibly the most practical use of this shape for jazz improvisers, as dominant seventh chords are extremely common in jazz harmony. If we look at this motif in its historical context, there are several interesting things about it. The first is that we can see the late Michael Brecker, a celebrated saxophonist and devotee of John Coltrane’'s music, using an identical shape in bar 92 of his solo on the piece Pools by the jazz fusion group Steps Ahead.

The brackets indicate the relevant segment; we can see that it is simply a transposed version of the original Brecker construction. This pattern is well known and attributed to Brecker. On his website, Mornington Lockett refers to a version of this pattern as a classic Michael Brecker construction.

The relationship between Brecker’s pattern and the motif by Coltrane is clear. It seems very likely that Brecker, who is known to have transcribed a great deal of Coltrane’'s music, heard this motif (perhaps subconsciously) and created his version of it. This is a very exciting discovery, and it surely demonstrates how artists as great as Brecker are very much influenced by their own heroes, just like the novice jazz musician. Use of Triad Pairs The use of triad pairs is well documented in jazz. Several books exclusively cover this topic, such as Walt Weiskopf’s Intervallic Improvisation: The Modern Sound and Gary Campbell’s’ Triad Pairs for Jazz. The most common technique is to alternate the use of two triads, creating a hexatonic (six note) scale. However, as Jason Lynn states in his article on the technique, in order for this approach to yield a hexatonic (six note) scale, the two triads must be mutually exclusive – they must contain no common tones.’ This technique can create some very interesting colors of tonality. Below we see how two major triads (the most common pairing of triads) can produce, on a major chord, a Lydian or #11 sound.

Similarly, over a dominant 7th chord, two major triads can produce the sound of a suspended 4th, or, as it would be known to jazz musicians, a ‘sus chord’.

In Coltrane'’s cadenza on I Want to Talk About You we can clearly see his use of this technique.

Here we see the alternating of E minor triad and F major triad along with C augmented triad and Bb diminished triad.

Since Coltrane is not playing over a fixed chord sequence at this point, it is harder to decipher what tonality this triad pair implies. The most obvious would be that of C major with a #11, i.e. the church mode of C Lydian. Because a diatonic scale cannot contain 3 semitones next to one another, the missing seventh note from the hexatonic must be D, as either Db or D# would result in a non-diatonic scale. This would indicate that the tonality implied must be that of one of the church modes of C. However, as we will see by Coltrane'’s use of synthetic scales, there is no need for us to be bound to the conventions of diatonic scales in our analysis of his music.

In this example, the triad pairs are not mutually exclusive, and so together create a pentatonic scale rather than a hexatonic. This pentatonic is very interesting and could be used to describe several advanced jazz harmonic sounds.

This is perhaps one of the most attractive of its possible manifestations. In the context of a C7 chord, the pentatonic contains two altered tensions that are found in the altered scale that were covered in the first section of this essay. These are the b2 and #5 (Db and G#). In addition, the natural 3rd (E) and flattened 7th (Bb) mean that the chord's function is not obscured, – the scale only colors it. This is a prime example of how the analysis of Coltrane’'s cadenza can produce material that is suitable for improvisers to absorb into their melodic and harmonic vocabulary. Use of Synthetic Scales Synthetic scales can be defined as non-diatonic scales, i.e. scales that are not modes of the major, harmonic major, harmonic minor or melodic minor scales. Examples of these are the whole-tone scale and the diminished scale. Classical musicians may know these same scales as Messiaen’s 1st and 2nd modes of limited transposition. Another example of a synthetic scale is the augmented scale. This is constructed of alternating minor thirds and semitones to form a six note scale (hexatonic). It can also be thought of as two augmented triads a semitone apart and so another example of the technique of triad pairs that has already been noted.

If the order of intervals is reversed so that the scale is now formed by repeating semitone-minor third, this new scale is called the inverted augmented scale.

The following extract can be analyzed and shown to be an example of Coltrane using the inverted augmented scale.

Further analysis can give an indication of the tonalities that Coltrane is implying in this phrase.

This shows how the shape of the augmented scale can be used to outline an augmented tonality, i.e. a chord containing a #5. One might say that we cannot be sure that Coltrane was thinking of this exact scale when improvising this extract. However, there is good evidence that the saxophonist was very familiar with this synthetic scale. In the book, ‘The Augmented Scale in Jazz’, Walt Weiskopf and Ramon Ricker admit that in examining improvised solos it appears to the authors that most soloists have used augmented scales and triads in an intuitive manner. It is doubtful that many of the players cited in this book have systematically tried to codify their use of this material.’ However, they go on to say that two players that might be an exception to this speculation are John Coltrane and Michael Brecker’. The clearest indicator of Coltrane'’s familiarity with the augmented scale is his use of it in his composition One Down, One Up. This piece has a form of AABA and is comparable with Miles Davis composition So What in its use of only two chords each A section is Bb 7#5 throughout and likewise each B section is composed only ofAb 7#5.

As shown below, this extract from One Down, One Up contains all but one notes of the inverted augmented scale, and includes no tones extraneous to that scale.

Given that this melody was pre-composed and thought-out carefully, we can be almost certain that Coltrane was thinking of an augmented scale as the basis for his melodic material. Therefore, we can be confident that the examples of augmented scale material in the cadenza were intentional by the saxophonist. Use of the Three-Tonic Cycle To jazz musicians, John Coltrane'’s most infamous composition is surely Giant Steps. This piece is well-known for being a minefield for improvisers, who are often tested on their ability to successfully navigate the treacherous chord changes. In Giant Steps, instead of following most common jazz standards which modulate generally round the cycle of fourths or in tone and semitone shifts, Coltrane takes the major third as the basic for his harmonic movement. A number of common standards did contain elements of this kind of modulation, such as Rodgers and Hart’s Have you Met Miss Jones.

As we can see, the initial tonal center of B moves down a minor third to G by way of a traditional II-V-I cadence, typical of jazz harmony. Notably, in the 6th bar of this bridge the direction of the major third cycle changes, and the Eb tonal centre rises to G instead of going down to B. In Giant Steps, Coltrane took this technique to new extremes by using several patterns of modulation to traverse the chord sequence. He made frequent use of the technique of prefixing each new tonic center with its respective II-V cadence, or at least its dominant.

from Giant Steps In the extract notated below, we can see evidence of Coltrane using this system of modulation by major third in his improvisation.

At normal speed, this section sounds extremely chaotic, but on closer inspection, there is definite pattern in Coltrane'’s use of repeating shapes.

In the above analysis of the key passage from the middle of the extract, Mornington Lockett, an expert on Coltrane’'s work, has identified the tonalities that Coltrane is implying. We should keep in mind that Gb major is the relative major of Eb minor, and so for the purposes of this analysis we can treat them as indicative of the same general tonality. Therefore, we can state that the sequence of key centers inside the square brackets is B minor – Eb minor – G minor – Eb minor – G minor. These three centers (B, Eb and G) form an augmented triad, as they are each a major third away from each other. Read the full article

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FFVII:REMAKE - A Review

So I beat the game two weeks ago and started writing down my thoughts while they were fresh in my mind, but I didn’t post anything then because my one IRL friend who is also playing it hadn’t finished it yet and I didn’t want to risk posting anything spoiler-y. But the extra time has allowed me to play through the game again on Hard difficulty, which has allowed me to reconsider and elaborate on some of my thoughts. And frankly at this point I just need to dump my Very Big Opinions somewhere, so... here ya go.

I discuss visuals, gameplay, character and story below. I’ve tried to keep spoilers minimal up front, though obviously if you want to go into the game totally cold, don’t read this. All major spoilers are clearly tagged. All of it is below a cut to spare your dash.

Also, there are pretty pictures, because why not?

First, my background with this franchise: I played through the original FFVII multiple times; I’ve watched and rewatched Advent Children and Last Order, played Crisis Core, gave up on Dirge of Cerberus despite my deep love for Vincent Valentine (sorry, VV, but your game was just a mess), and lamented that Before Crisis wasn’t available in my country. I even played (and own!) Ehrgeiz, the obscure fighting game that featured the main cast. (Still bitter that they didn’t keep Miki Shinichirou as the voice of Sephiroth. He’s one of my faves.)

^ Ehrgeiz, a mediocre fighting game that forever endeared itself to me by including Turks!Vincent Valentine as a playable character. 💖

In short, I’ve been waiting for this game for DECADES.

So. Here we go. My thoughts on Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE.

The good:

The character models are very pretty. With individual pores, threads and scuffs visible, they’re so detailed that it’s almost impossible to reconcile them with the mouthless sprites from the original game – even more so than Advent Children (and dear goodness, that was over a decade ago now, wasn’t it?). Still, they’ve kept the costume details and absurd proportions largely intact (Barret’s fists are literally larger than Tifa’s entire head, yet somehow it works visually), so it’s not too much of a departure from the familiar.

They’ve kept the aesthetic. I was afraid the game would try to update the iconic world of Midgar, but by and large, it’s full of visually-arresting designs that preserve the gritty-industrial look and feel of the original.

Japanese version is included. BLESS YOU, Square Enix, for including the Japanese voices and character animations. Not only is it impossible for me to hear Cloud in anything other than Sakurai Takahiro’s voice, but the Japanese script is a bit nicer to the characters. I’m not really keen on the English dub… but more on that below.

They fixed the spelling of Aerith’s name. This may seem like a minor point, but considering it’s been 20 years and I’m still bitter that Devil May Cry still hasn’t corrected “Nelo Angelo,” it’s a small victory.

Improved combat. Admittedly, I wasn’t sold on the new combat system at first, but after playing through the game twice, I’ve come to really like it. It has a few rough edges and can get chaotic in some battles, but it does a decent job of blending the feel of an action game with turn-based strategy. The fact that you can switch to a more traditional turn-based system if you prefer is also nice. (I haven’t tried Classic mode yet, though.)

Weapon customization. The Skill Points system allows you to upgrade your loadout instead of acquiring new gear. The tutorial was somewhat lacking (I didn’t quite figure out the multiple-core-unlock thing right away), but I appreciated the ability to add materia slots or stat buffs rather than just cycling through a dozen swords that Cloud apparently keeps in his back pocket.

Background dialogue management. On the whole, the conversations as you run through town enhance the story without slogging down the gameplay; you don’t have to stop and talk to every single resident, because snatches of their conversation reach you (and your on-screen chatlog) as you pass. You can stop and listen for more detail if you want, or you can just keep moving. The extra worldbuilding is really nice.

The music. The orchestrated versions of the original themes are excellent (and some of those music cues gave me goosebumps… Did I spend way too many hours immersed in the original game? Probably). I can take or leave some of the collectible jukebox tunes, but the background music in general is good. (But did I earn that Disc Jockey trophy? Yes, yes I did.)

Supporting character development. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge actually have characters! And personalities! Clichéd ones, admittedly, but it’s an improvement over the original game killing them all off within the first few minutes. The game also does justice to the Turks, and actually surprised me with how much depth of character it gave Reno and Rude in particular (perhaps setting them up for a mini redemption arc so players forgive them for dropping a plate on tens of thousands of slum residents?). Their moments of concern for each other and (brief) crises of conscience made them more than the stock villains they were in the original game, more in line with their temporarily good-aligned characters in Advent Children. Tseng, likewise, was on point. However, I do have to qualify all this with one irate question: Where the heck is Elena?! Seems like the female characters are always getting left out… /sigh/

Improved plot devices. REMAKE cleans up some of the more questionable and outdated content from the original. As you likely already know from the demo, the new game somewhat exonerates the protagonists by having Shinra blow up their own mako reactor to turn public opinion against AVALANCHE (possibly because someone finally realized that it’s hard to sympathize with characters who are willing to melt down an entire reactor and kill a bunch of innocent civilians). AVALANCHE are still eco-terrorists, but they’re… terrorists with a conscience? I dunno, at least they feel bad when people die now… Likewise, the weird and uncomfortable Honey Bee Inn segment of the original game has been reborn as an amazing dance extravaganza. Less voyeurism/prostitution, more Vegas floor show (complete with minigame choreography) and makeover. The whole Don Corneo scenario is still hella creepy, but frankly, there’s nothing that can fix that.

Series references. Fans of the original will appreciate all the inside jokes and direct references to the original game and other franchise entries: One-off comments about Chocobo racing; a broken console in Wall Market that shoots at you; a framed picture of the original 32-bit Seventh Heaven; ads for Banora apple juice; side mentions of characters and plot devices from spinoff games; PHS communication… The game definitely pays tribute to its history. They even recreate the original loading screen and several of Cloud’s iconic poses/animations throughout the game:

The neutral:

Recycled gags. Look, I know Advent Children was the ultimate evolution of FFVII for a while, and admittedly, it did some things very well. The running gag with Rude’s sunglasses and the victory fanfare being used as a ringtone are some of the best moments in the film, in part because they were so unexpected. But as much as I enjoyed the repeated nods to AC in this game, they felt a little desperate, like there were no new jokes to insert so they had to double down on the ones they’d used the last time this franchise had a renaissance. (See Rude’s broken sunglasses, below.) And fitting into the series as a whole, it feels a little weird. Why is Rude’s ringtone the same as the clones’ from Advent Children? Does Barret really need to sing the victory fanfare over and over when he defeats an enemy? Is there supposed to be some history behind that song that was left out of the worldbuilding? It just feels too meta.

Arbitrary localization of names. I don’t really grasp why it was necessary to rename so many items and characters for the English market. Some changes make sense for localization (e.g. Whack-a-Box certainly works better for an American audience than Crash Box), but others seem arbitrary, like changing Aniyan Kunyan to Andrea Rhodea or Mugi to Oates (a play on the meaning of his name in Japanese, but... does it matter?). And then… well, I don’t want to spoil A Major Plot Element, but there’s another thing that changes names from one English word (in the Japanese track) to a different English word. Why? No idea. It doesn’t affect gameplay, and it’s not really a problem, but listening to the Japanese track, I found it jarring to have the subtitles contradict what I was hearing.

Underutilized characters. While the whole gamut of original FFVII characters make appearances, several of them aren’t used to full effect, or aren’t used at all to advance the story. Rufus Shinra’s bossfight is a decent challenge, but while his character was vital to both the original FFVII and Advent Children, his presence in this game is little more than a cameo. His fight could be cut or swapped out with any other boss, and it would have zero effect on the plot. Similarly, while Hojo is a key player in the full story (which this game doesn’t cover, since it’s only a fraction of the original timeline), he’s largely wasted here, except as a means of extending play time by making you wander through corridors and fight a bunch of monsters for “research.” (I have no idea what his motivation is; you’d think he’d be more interested in recapturing Aerith or Cloud, but instead he just... opens an elevator and lets them leave? after they beat up some midbosses.) Reeve Tuesti actually has a solid presence in this game, but since he’s ONLY ever active as himself, there’s no explanation for the random Cait Sith cameo in one scene (players new to the franchise probably have no idea why a random cartoon cat showed up for a few seconds and was never mentioned again). Obviously the plot arcs have to change when the game is covering only a few days’ time in a much longer story, and the major players need to be introduced at some point if they’re going to feature in later games in the series, but from a narrative standpoint, there are an awful lot of superfluous characters doing things for no reason in this installment.

The bad:

THE PADDING. Dear goodness, there is so much padding to make this a standalone game instead of just the first chapter of a longer adventure. I got really, really sick of running literally from one end of the map to the other on side quests – and that’s me, an avowed trophy hunter who spends hours scouring dark corners for collectible items in other games, saying that. So much of this game felt like time fill that didn’t really advance the story. It’s also full of unnecessary new characters with improbable Squeenix hair, like Roche the super-annoying motorcycle SOLDIER (below), or Leslie, Don Corneo’s doorman who somehow merits his own backstory and side quest. (Though in fairness, every FFVII sequel has added superfluous characters, with Crisis Core possibly being the worst offender.) But it just felt really drawn-out and bloated for a game of this generation. If this game had been as compact and tightly-written as the other games I typically play, it probably only would have taken me 15 hours to beat instead of 50. (I don’t actually know how many hours I spent on it the first time through, as I didn’t check the play clock before restarting on Hard difficulty. I do know it took me over 110 hours total to complete the game on both modes, though much of the second run was spent dying repeatedly on a handful of nasty fights. Hard mode removes items and MP replenishment, and if you run out of MP at any point during a chapter, you’re going to die. A lot.)

The pacing. Related to the above... the Midgar portion of the original game was just the setup for a larger story. It wasn’t meant to have its own complete dramatic arc so much as to introduce you to the world and the major players. Consequently, there are some really odd beats in this story, as well as a total lack of urgency in your mission. There are no natural places to slot in the side quests and minigames, so they’re shoehorned awkwardly between plot sequences. “Quick, our friend is in mortal peril and needs our help!” "Okay, cool, we’ll go rescue her after we spend ten hours running around town doing random errands for townspeople and playing games with the local kids.” Uh... what?

The graphics just aren’t as good as they should be. While the character models are gorgeous, there are a lot of low-res background textures and weird polygons that don’t quite match up with other components. Most egregious are the Shinra logos, which frequently get close-ups as part of the fixed camera work and, frankly, look like lossy JPEGs. (See image below, screencapped from a PS4 Pro. Those jagged edges on the logo are present throughout the entire game.) There are weird clipping errors and artifacted images and reflective surfaces that don’t reflect, making the game look more like something from the PS3 era than a 4K late-gen PS4 game. (And it’s not that we don’t have the technology: Uncharted 4 was released back in 2016, and the rendering of its vast world was twice as pretty. Devil May Cry 5, released in early 2019, has far more realistic textures and object interaction. Granted, those are different types of games with fewer NPCs to render, but I feel like there’s no excuse for a game this big to look this mediocre.)

The HUD could be better. The lower-corners concept is okay, though it took me a while to train my eyes to travel between both sides of the screen and track the fight action. But for a long time, I didn’t even notice the commands in the upper left corner of the screen, and after playing through the game twice I still have no idea what they say because I couldn’t focus on the tiny text long enough to read them while trying not to die in combat. (I just looked it up; apparently they’re combat control shortcuts? Huh, that would have been useful to know.) It wasn’t until my second time through that I realized there even WERE separate controls on screen during the motorcycle minigames; I had resorted to panicked button mashing to figure it out the first time through because there was no tutorial (you’re just dropped into the action) and, having ignored the small text for the previous hundred combats, I had no reason to look for on-screen instructions there. Not that it would have helped, since on many backgrounds the text in the upper left is really difficult to read (see below). It’s worth noting that I have better than 20/20 vision and played this game on a large TV screen and still had trouble reading some things; on a smaller TV, or for someone with less acute vision (like my sister, who is blind in one eye), I think even the basic menu controls would be difficult to see. While you can resize the font for subtitles, my cursory glance through the menu did not uncover an option to increase the size of the HUD. 

Inter-fight menu mechanics. Specifically, the inability to save (or save loadout settings) between fights in a multi-part sequence. There are several back-to-back fights in which it is necessary to switch characters or change gear between bosses. The game treats them as one continuous fight, though it does allows you to access the equipment menu by holding square during key cutscenes. Which is good, if you only have one of a particular materia or accessory that you need to switch between characters, and in most cases when you die the game lets you restart just before your current fight instead of restarting the whole sequence -- also good, since some multi-stage bosses can easily take 20-30 minutes to beat, and if several of those are strung together in sequence, you’re in for a long play session to get past them. But since it’s treated as one fight, you can’t save between bosses (more than once, I had to leave my PS4 running in Rest Mode overnight and just hoped we didn’t have a power glitch), and if you happen to get killed and need to restart the fight, your loadouts reset. Which means if you’re, say, fighting the end boss on Hard difficulty and get killed in the first two minutes -- which happened to me a lot -- by the time you restart the fight, sit through the unskippable cutscene, access the menu and rearrange all the materia and accessories you need, you’re spending five or six minutes gearing up for two minutes of play, and then doing that over and over again every time you die. It gets really old.

The English dub script. *deep breath* Okay, look, I know I can be a bit elitist about translations, but I really do not like the English adaptation of this game. It makes Cloud come across as less socially-awkward and far more of a deliberate jerk, Aerith is mouthy and even swears (which is not accurate to her original character), and it downplays some of the symbolism that’s more obvious in the Japanese script. One quick example: When Aerith gives Cloud a flower, she says (in Japanese), “In the language of flowers, this means ‘reunion.’” It’s subbed/dubbed in English, “Lovers used to give these when they were reunited.” That’s a subtle difference, but since the concept of “reunion” is a freakin’ huge part of the FFVII plot, and since Sephiroth was on screen literally seconds before that line is delivered, my brain automatically went, “OMG REUNION!!!” while I’m guessing people listening in English only picked up on the romantic subtext. It’s a pretty minor thing, and of course translation is always a complex balancing act between literal meaning and local market understanding, but the English version just seemed to me to have a different vibe overall. (Unfortunately, the English subtitles are the same as the dub, so unless you can understand the Japanese audio you’re kind of stuck with that dialogue.)

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[WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT]

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- …And my #1 complaint about Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE is…

…it’s not actually a remake.

Sure, the game starts out the same way and covers a lot of the same events, but fundamentally, it’s a sequel, not a retelling. It’s evident from Cloud’s future-oriented visions throughout the game that something else is going on, and the ending MAKES NO SENSE if you don’t already know the story. Heck, even the rest of the game doesn’t really make sense if you don’t know the story -- Sephiroth’s presence is never explained; Zack isn’t even introduced, just shows up randomly at the end; Cloud’s flashbacks of Tifa and her dead father in Nibelheim are left as a complete mystery (and since she evidently remembers the burning of her town, judging by her dialogue outside Aerith’s house, why doesn’t she even react when Sephiroth shows up?).

The core elements of the plot – the Feelers (Whispers) preserving a specific fate; the three entities from the future (whose weapon types just happen to correspond to certain named characters) defending their timeline; the return of post-Advent Children Sephiroth (the only time we’ve seen him in human form with one black wing), who has inhabited the Lifestream since his death and promised that he would never truly disappear, who in the end appeals to Cloud directly for an alliance rather than attempting to control him, because he knows now that Cloud is strong enough to defy the Reunion instinct; the change in the outcome of story events in which Biggs (and, unconfirmed as to which timeline he’s actually in, but quite possibly Zack) now survives his intended death -- all point toward Sephiroth trying to manipulate destiny into an alternate outcome in which he is victorious, and using this naive version of Cloud to facilitate it. That means this game is taking place in an alternate or splinter universe, created at some point after the events of the original Final Fantasy VII, and possibly even after the events of Advent Children.

All of that is fine from an overall continuing-story perspective – it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, like the fact that Aerith might survive now that Cloud has seen prescient flashes of her death (among other events), and there are opportunities for more story twists and changes from what players might expect. But touting this as a remake of the original game has the potential to confuse players who are new to the franchise. FFVII was groundbreaking back in 1997, and it defined JRPGs for an entire generation of Western gamers. But that was more than two decades ago, and a lot of current gamers weren’t even born then, so while they’ve probably heard of the classic game, they aren’t necessarily steeped in its lore. FFVII:R relies heavily on prior knowledge of the series to carry its twist ending, so it largely fails as a standalone game.

Also, speaking as a longtime fan of the franchise… I honestly found the ending rather lackluster. It was a twist, of sorts, but not the sort of shocking, mind-bending revelation that made the first game so iconic. Granted, it’s hard to follow an act like revealing that your protagonist’s entire identity is a lie, not to mention killing off one of your main characters a third of the way into the story! But when the surprise ending is just, Surprise! We’re going to change things up a bit this time around so you aren’t entirely sure what’s coming! Also, here’s a gratuitous Sephiroth fight because everyone expects that, even though it doesn’t serve the main story at all nor resolve any conflicts previously established within this game! it smacks of Different for the sake of Being Different, not for the sake of a really amazing storyline they’re hiding up their sleeve. It’s a bit of a let-down, and I find that I... just... don’t really care that much. Which, for someone who’s been a fan of the series for nearly a quarter of a century, means there’s a Big Freaking Problem somewhere. If you’re not keeping the attention of your die-hard fans, how do you hope to build a fanbase of players new to the franchise?

Given the pacing and story issues inherent in this game, I’m not convinced that the following game(s) in the franchise are going to be structured any better. Considering the amount of pure side-quest padding they did in Midgar, I have no idea how they’ll maintain that same tone on something the scale of the World Map portion of the original game, unless they just completely eliminate things like Fort Condor and the submarine and the spaceship side quests. I have a feeling the Gold Saucer is going to be reduced to a Jessie flashback, a Chocobo race (probably to win a key item), and a battle arena run like the coliseum in Wall Market in this game. If they include all the story elements and side characters from the original, this series is going to be a dozen games long.

Still, on the whole this game was enjoyable, and I’m glad I played it. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but they haven’t completely killed off my interest, so I’ll probably continue with the series whenever the next game comes out. Though I’m not really sure if the higher-priced edition I pre-ordered was worth the extra money, so I may wait and see how the next game is shaping up before deciding which version to get...

But if they don’t give me a really pretty (playable) Vincent Valentine in the next installment, I may riot. I do have priorities.

[berniesrevolution]

Today’s cartoonishly twisted economic inequality has created a renaissance of “conspicuous consumption.” This was the term American sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined to describe the purchase of extravagant goods and services, not so much for the pleasure of consuming them but for their ability to signal affluence to others. For example, Forbes magazine’s Cost of Living Extremely Well Index tracks the price of “ultraluxe items” like quarter-million-dollar Russian sable fur coats, $55,000 private school tuition, and $16 million personal Sikorsky helicopters.

But the best place to turn for a peek at elite excess is definitely Mansion, the Friday Wall Street Journal supplement reviewing the wild extravagance of the hideously rich. Part advertising section, part ruling-class design review, part dangling inducement to middle managers to go on believing in the system, Mansion is a hilarious delight and everyone should read it to learn about the purposeless waste of the upper crust.

Sadly, the Journal’s aggressive paywall prevents many critical readers from peeking through the curtain to view the other side of our class-segregation system. Luckily Current Affairs has the keys! Brace yourself to find out where thirty years of tax cuts promised to create jobs have gone instead.

Reading Mansion quickly reveals the gigantic frigging sums wealthy people have seen fit to throw at their surroundings. From comfortless-looking glass tubs to specialized tequila freezers, the resources committed to these properties are staggering. Articles describe for us the cigar rooms, the $54,000 closet for a Beverly Hills teenager’s sports and drones, the enormous home theaters, the 4700 square-foot gym with a climbing wall. In a review of big-ticket housing in Holland, a rich Dutch designer of elite household renovations laughs “Sometimes I think I could live in that kitchen.” Another article finds real-world comps for super-hero movie mansions, which is easier than you might guess.

Rich-people housing embodies their rich-people diversions, including American car worship. A Miami tower grabbed attention in a crowded market by affiliating with Porsche and including a car elevator for residents, allowing them to park their chrome sport cars right in their chrome condos. An AOL co-founder’s house has an attached garage and a garage attached to the attached garage, with space for thirty cars. Oh, plus a dock for delivery trucks in one of the four kitchens. And while covering a Miami manse built on top of a seven-story parking structure, we learn the luxury garage includes a glass sculpture, 30-foot-high ceilings in places, and “sweeping views.” They hold weddings in it.

Many high-end city mansions have gone through a circuitous odyssey over the twentieth century, often built as giant brownstones for tycoons in the unregulated, no-progressive-income-tax era of the Gilded Age, but then taken over for schools or split into apartments or offices. Yet as the New Deal era has been repealed in endless Republican tax cuts, these properties are widely returning to their original functions as opulent single-family homes. A New York real estate agent comments “It’s like a return to the Gilded Age,” as the press reports that what has “put these mansions and townhouses back in play is the steady escalation of incredibly wealthy buyers” seeking more privacy than a conventional high-end condo can provide.

This kind of high-end marketing literature also teaches how class patterns endure in far more turbulent settings, even through the most cataclysmic events. Mansiondescribes the luxury market in Berlin, where waves of destruction and social reconstruction have crashed over the twentieth century, while still preserving the architecture of class privilege. One high-end West Berlin residential complex was originally built to be “a high-end residential hotel” but “has had many lives over the decades, including as the Weimar Republic’s economics ministry in the 1920s and as a West Berlin finance office during the Cold War.” Now, it has returned to its luxury market origins as elite condos. It’s history in the form of douchebag trophy properties.

Likewise Japan, which at midcentury was firebombed and nuked to kingdom come (the culprit was never caught), saw an archetypal property bubble in the 1980s. These upheavals don’t erase old patterns of excessive privilege and power, and Mansion tellsof Tokyo’s “most exclusive neighborhoods” where “luxury residential towers that cater to the city’s elite now sit where feudal lords once had their lavish villas.” Still, most Japanese domestic buyers “are more restrained in their definition of luxury. There is little demand for splashy interiors, or a gym or a swimming pool in the building.” Don’t these people know how to live!?

Of course, anyone familiar with real estate will know that often the appearance of age on a marketed property is homage rather than reality. Affectations of antiquity are a mainstay of real estate markets across class levels, including Tudor-era stonework and with fireplace “mantels salvaged from castles in France and England.” This reaches its apex in the clichéd tacky US “McMansion,” as you can see for yourself on Kate Wagner’s incredibly entertaining blog, McMansion Hell. Without snobbishness, Wagner playfully laments today’s clumsy and planless use of half-recalled and feverishly jumbled Gothic or colonial architecture, leaving much of the modern high-end property inventory a shallow parody of grandeur.

The anachronistic tacky grotesque is truly on parade in Mansion’s real estate listings. One Beverly Hills mansion “was originally built to resemble ‘Le Petit Trianon,’ Marie Antoinette’s private chateau in Versailles,” and includes “a whiskey lounge, a wine cellar, a cinema, three elevators and a salon and spa.” A rich retired fashion industry tycoon and wife bought a former grain mill outside Madrid and remodeled the property into a mansion, including the portion formerly housing workers, with ill-fitting modern gadgets. We’re told whimsically that the owner has limited knowledge of what the place was and when it operated. The couple also owns an Italian vineyard, vacations on Ibiza and plans to ruin a derelict Valencian farmhouse next.

(Continue Reading)

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 25 March 2019

Quick Bits:

Action Comics #1009 takes a moment to assess the damage caused by Leviathan as Superman, Lois, Jimmy, and Waller try to put the pieces together in the Fortress of Solitude. More inventive use of Superman’s x-ray vision from Steve Epting and Brad Anderson.

| Published by DC Comics

Amazing Spider-Man #18 continues “Hunted” unveiling the Kraven-bots and plan for rich folks to hunt the animal-themed villains (and Spider-Man), but not exactly why. This one also falls into the clichéd trap of bringing back obscure z-list characters only to kill them in order to show the stakes. I’m kind of getting tired of that, but otherwise this is still entertaining. Great art from Humberto Ramos, Victor Olazaba, Edgar Delgado, and Erick Arciniega.

| Published by Marvel

Avengers: No Road Home #7 takes us inside Spectrum’s worries and fears about what she’s becoming as the team tries to prevent Nyx from reclaiming the shards. It really feels like the entire creative team have been stepping up their game these past few issues, but as Paco Medina and Jesus Aburtov take over the art reins again this issue, it feels like the bar has been raised again. Beautiful artwork.

| Published by Marvel

Bad Luck Chuck #1 is an entertaining and unique debut from Lela Gwenn, Matthew Dow Smith, Kelly Fitzpatrick, and Frank Cvetkovic. It stars Charlene Manchester, a seeming walking disaster, who has started up a business for the chaos her mere presence causes. It’s different, there’s some nice incidental humour and a hook for a broader story involving an insurance investigator tailing her, all with some wonderful art from Smith and Fitzpatrick.

| Published by Dark Horse

Batgirl #33 is pretty heavy as Babs deals with James being released. Great work all around from Mairghread Scott, Elena Casagrande, Scott Godlewski, John Kalisz, and Andworld Design really delivering on the heightened emotions Babs is going through with the release of her serial killer brother. Particularly the switch between blue and red washes Kalisz uses when Babs confronts her father.

| Published by DC Comics

Black Hammer: Age of Doom #9 continues through this bleak new world where almost everyone has forgotten who they were and there’s apparently a lot of gay panic, on Earth and Mars. It’s rather disturbing. Dean Ormston and Dave Stewart deliver some great moody art.

| Published by Dark Horse

Black Science #39 gives us a heartfelt and humorous reunion, possibly one of the final good moments before the series is going to pivot to the end. I get the feeling that Rick Remender, Matteo Scalera, Moreno Dinisio, and Rus Wooton are going to put us through hell reading the final arc, so this bit of happiness with some funny stories and at least a bit of retribution, is great to see. 

| Published by Image / Giant Generator

Coda #10 is huge as Si Spurrier, Matías Bergara, Michael Doig, and Jim Campbell work through some of the truth of what’s been driving this entire story. It’s damn good, with some of the best storytelling in comics right now.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Crimson Lotus #5 is one of two finales this week for a Hellboy universe mini-series, seeing the end to John Arcudi, Mindy Lee, Michelle Madsen, and Clem Robins’ tale of Crimson Lotus’ early days. I’ve loved the set up for Dai and Shengli in this series and definitely would not be averse to seeing more, there’s a nice feel of pulp action and mystery from a different perspective than what we’ve seen in Lobster Johnson. Also, there’s a great surprise appearance.

| Published by Dark Horse

Daredevil #3 is proving that Chip Zdarsky, Marco Checchetto, Sunny Gho, and Clayton Cowles’ excellent first two issues are no fluke, “Know Fear” is easily shaping up to be one of the best Daredevil stories in decades. There’s a wonderful depth and complexity to the characters, the tension of a broken and beaten Daredevil coming into conflict with the police is taut, there are some amazing surprises, and the art is phenomenal.

| Published by Marvel

Dial H for Hero #1 is some ridiculous fun from Sam Humphries, Joe Quinones, and Dave Sharpe. We’re introduced to the new guardian of the H Dial, Miguel, an average boy forced to work his Uncle’s Mayo Madness food truck after what’s possibly the death of his parents (it’s not made explicit, so something else could have happened), searching for another thrill after being saved by Superman. Quinones’ art is one of the main drawing factors, with an incredible shift in style during the hero portion, both he and Humphries do an incredible job poking fun at the approach.

| Published by DC Comics / Wonder Comics

Doctor Strange #12 reunites Mark Waid and Barry Kitson for part one of “Herald Supreme” as a pushy, obnoxious alien steamrolls Strange in an attempt to stop Galactus from destroying his homeworld. It’s weird to see Strange brought low again so soon after the first arc, along with the destruction of all of the magic his artifacts house, but it is an interesting predicament he finds himself in struggling to stop Galactus from devouring the mystic planes.

| Published by Marvel

The Flash #67 builds off of last issue’s Rogues spotlight on the Trickster and the previous sub-plot of Commander Cold’s investigation as Joshua Williamson, Scott Kolins, Luis Guerrero, and Steve Wands kick off part one of “The Greatest Trick of All”. Kolins reminds us why he’s one of the best Flash artists of the past few decades amidst a story that is bizarrely happy.

| Published by DC Comics

The Forgotten Queen #2 reveals more of War-Monger’s history, as she navigates the possibility of feelings of love for what seems to be the first time. Really intriguing character-building here from Tini Howard, Amilcar Pinna, Ulises Arreola, and Jeff Powell.

| Published by Valiant

Friendo #5 concludes with what feels like one of the weirdest interpretations of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I’ve ever read. The horror story of rampant consumerism mixed with reality television comes to a head as Leo finally gets his Action Joe action figure in possibly the most extreme way. Alex Paknadel, Martin Simmonds, Dee Cunniffe, and Taylor Esposito end this wild ride on a high note.

| Published by Vault

Go-Bots #5 is the incredible end to what has been an excellent series reinterpreting the Go-Bots by Tom Scioli. It started as a relatively normal interpretation of the property, working well with nostalgia while still presenting a unique rumination on free will and robot ethics, then elevated into all out insanity pushing the Go-Bots in new and frightening directions as the bots took over. This final issue explores that post-apocalypse further and cleverly seeds the idea that the Go-Bots were the progenitors to the Transformers.

| Published by IDW

Hellboy and the BPRD: 1956 #5 is the other conclusion in the Hellboy universe this week, detailing a bit more of Hellboy’s time in Mexico, particular after Esteban’s death and he was filming wrestling movies. There’s some wonderful character moments as he laments Esteban’s loss and the even more personal loss of his best friend and dog, Mac. It also underlines Bruttenholm’s lack of soft skills and empathy, not noticing either Margaret and Archie’s romance or how bad Hellboy is hurting emotionally right now. Great work from Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson, Mike Norton, Michael Avon Oeming, Yishan Li, Dave Stewart, and Clem Robins.

| Published by Dark Horse

Invaders #3 adds more fuel to the fire with an uncaring American military moving forward on a perceived and actual threat from Atlantis and more questions about Namor’s past and possible mental instability. Chip Zdarsky is doing some very interesting things with plot threads spilling out of Secret Empire and acting as essentially a bridge between Avengers and Captain America.

| Published by Marvel

Isola #7 sees our duo come across a quarry town full of women who’ve had their children and men snatched up by the war or worse. It’s an interesting development of the real human cost of war, but it also opens up a mystery as to what or who is really taking the kids, and what they’re possibly becoming. Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Msassyk, and Aditya Bidikar continue to produce one of the most beautiful, intriguing, and entertaining comics on the shelves right now.

| Published by Image

The Lollipop Kids #4 has some absolutely stunning artwork from Diego Yapur and DC Alonso. Previous issues have been incredibly impressive, but some of the compositions in this one take it to a whole other level.

| Published by AfterShock

Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #3 reveals just how thoroughly insane the Ozymandias-styled, world-“saving”, alternate Cannon is as Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Mary Safro, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou continue to push this story in intriguing directions. It’s funny, because the conflict, the superhero battles, feel like window-dressing for something else still. Especially as the “good” Cannon traverses panels.

| Published by Dynamite

Sabrina the Teenage Witch #1 is another entertaining debut under the new “Archie Forever” initiative, from Kelly Thompson, Veronica Fish, Andy Fish, and Jack Morelli. Like the previous titles, it appears as though there isn’t a lot (or possibly any) of overlap with the other series, introducing us to this rebooted Sabrina’s family. It’s off to a good start, familiar faces in play, humour abounding, Salem being a little bellend, and the mystery of a wendigo.

| Published by Archie

Sharkey: The Bounty Hunter #2 is worth it for Simone Bianchi’s gorgeous artwork alone. Bianchi has always been an interesting artist, with inventive layouts and character designs, rich colour choices, and a beautiful soft-focus, painted style, all of that on display here for this story. 

| Published by Image

The Silencer #15 is a bit bittersweet since we know that it’s ending now, I would have hoped given how tied to Leviathan that it is that the series would at least see a tie-in to the forthcoming Event Leviathan, but sadly no. In the mean time, we’re still getting an excellent action comic from Dan Abnett, V. Ken Marion, Sandu Florea, Mike Spicer, and Tom Napolitano.

| Published by DC Comics

Star Wars: Vader - Dark Visions #2 is another excellent self-contained story exploring Darth Vader’s effect on others, from Dennis Hallum, Brian Level, Jordan Boyd, and Joe Caramagna. This one takes a look at the desperation and recklessness that fear of Vader’s wrath can have on someone. The layouts from Level are phenomenal.

| Published by Marvel

Stone Star #1 is a great digital original debut from Jim Zub, Max Dunbar, Espen Grundetjern, and Marshall Dillon. It introduces us to a pair of scavengers on a planet being visited by a travelling battle arena ship, kind of taking its cue from hero shooters like Overwatch and more traditional fighting games like Mortal Kombat. There’s an interesting hook of human (or alien) trafficking to go along with the coming-of-age tale that’s set up as one of the scavengers, Dail, is offered a chance to possibly study and train with the gladiators. Great art and character designs from Dunbar and Grundetjern.

| Published by Swords & Sassery

Transformers #2 engaged me a bit more than the first issue. It’s still very methodical and slow in its pacing and revelations, but there are some interesting hooks in the mystery of who murdered Brainstorm and in who was taking potshots at the Ascenticon rally. The mix of politics and self-determination through will to power is certainly an interesting concept from Brian Ruckley.

| Published by IDW

William Gibson’s Alien 3 #5 concludes what has been an excellent adaptation of Gibson’s screenplay by Johnnie Christmas, Tamra Bonvillain, and Nate Piekos. This final chapter ramps up the action and the stakes as the remaining survivors try to flee the station before blowing it and the aliens inside up. Tons of great horrific art from Christmas and Bonvillain.

| Published by Dark Horse

Wonder Woman #67 continues “Giants War”, with G. Willow Wilson doing a decent job of further rehabilitating Giganta. Also some interesting developments regarding the titans that may not be titans.

| Published by DC Comics

Other Highlights: 30 Days of Night 100 Page Giant, The Avant-Guards #3, Beyonders #5, Black Panther #10, Black Widow #3, Bone Parish #8, Books of Magic #6, Breakneck #4, Cinema Purgatorio #17, Detective Comics #1000, DuckTales #19, Fantastic Four #8, Femme Magnifique: 10 Magnificent Women who Changed the World, Fight Club 3 #3, Freedom Fighters #4, GI Joe: Sierra Muerte #2, GLOW #1, Goddess Mode #4, Hardcore #4, Hex Wives #6, Ice Cream Man #11, Invader Zim #41, Ironheart #4, Jim Henson’s Beneath the Dark Crystal #8, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: Coronation #12, Jughead: The Hunger #13, Justice League Odyssey #7, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest #5, Martian Manhunter #4, Marvel Comics Presents #3, Marvel Rising #1, Mera: Tidebreaker, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #37, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #41, Outcast #40, Punks Not Dead: London Calling #2, Quincredible #5, The Realm #12, Rick & Morty #48, Rick & Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons: Director’s Cut #1, Sabrina: The Teenage Witch #1, These Savage Shores #1 - Black & White Edition, Spawn #295, Spider-Man/Deadpool #48, Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #30, Star Wars Adventures #19, Super Sons: The Polarshield Project, Superior Spider-Man #4, TMNT: Urban Legends #11, The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion #5, Viking Queen, Wasted Space #8

Recommended Collections: Animosity: Evolution - Volume 2: Lex Machina, Asgardians of the Galaxy - Volume 1: Infinity Armada, The Ballad of Sang, Barrier - Limited Edition Slipcase Set, Charlie’s Angels - Volume 1, Cloak & Dagger: Negative Exposure, Coda - Volume 1, Flash - Volume 9: Reckoning of the Forces, Mind MGMT Omnibus - Volume 1, Ms. Marvel - Volume 10: Time and Again, Regression - Volume 3, Sheena: Queen of the Jungle - Volume 2, TMNT: Rise of the TMNT - Volume 1, War Bears

d. emerson eddy is just a worthless liar. He is just an imbecile. He will only complicate you. Trust in him and fall as well.

[gallifreyanlibertea]

I Took My Hater Out On A Date (2/7)

(1/7)  (3/7)  (4/7)  (5/7)  (6/7)

a/n: thank you to everyone that replied to my post!

Arthur barely heard the text notification over his yowling cats. Of course, the beasts only got louder once he turned his attention away from them in pursuit of his phone. They thumped his leg, stomped on his foot. Arthur sighed defeatedly as his fingers curled back into his palm. It seemed his cats weren’t going to let him check his messages until they’d been fed.

Honestly, they acted like Arthur starved them. 

Arthur scraped the food into their food bowls, pausing momentarily at the sound of yet another phone notification, to which his second kitten, Gregory, mewled yet again at Arthur’s distraction.

“Alright, alright.” Arthur snapped. He finished dispensing the food and his cats went to town, to which Arthur’s annoyed, furrowed brows ironed out with a slight, forgiving smile. He couldn’t stay mad at them for long. He reached to scratch their ears as they ate, only to be startled by yet another notification. It was one too many from what Arthur usually received at such a quiet, boring time as one twenty-three PM.

Most of his friends were at work by that time. Arthur would’ve been as well, had it not been for the fact that he’d slipped in his bathtub and nearly snapped his back in two a few days ago- he chose never to explain that incident in detail to his YouTube subscribers, who no doubt saw him as a young, sarcastic and somewhat robust man. It was an illusion he hadn’t been so quick to shatter, so he’d told them he was hospitalized and that was all they needed to know. 

It wasn’t exactly a lie so much as it was a half-truth.

Arthur had been leaning to check his messages when he was startled by five firm knocks on his front door. He scrambled to brush the cat hair off his sweater before he opened the door to- “Francis? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I left early. Have you seen it?” Francis said, lips spreading in what seemed to be a mocking smile.”That American’s new video?”

“Wh- what? I-”

Francis helped himself into Arthur’s apartment, squatting by Arthur’s coffee table to retrieve Arthur’s laptop from underneath, all with the familiarity of an ex- live-in boyfriend.

It put a sour taste in Arthur’s mouth to remember that he’d actually dated Francis Bonnefoy.

Francis hated cats, Arthur hated the French, Arthur wasn’t quite sure how it had all worked out for three months, much less a minute.

He supposed the sex had been good. Really good. That was all their relationship had been, really. It lacked any substance, it had moved far too fast, it was far too sloppy, which made it all the more easier for Arthur when Francis finally grew bored of Arthur and broke things off.

Nevertheless, Arthur found that he was never able to truly get rid of Francis Bonnefoy. He hadn’t minded that sometimes.

He minded it now, as he watched Francis nearly step on a cat in his hurry to sit on the couch.

“Watch out for Greg!” Arthur hissed.

Francis paused. His lip curled. “I’ll never understand your choice of pet names.”

“The name means to watch, to be alert.” Arthur sniffed. “Cats deserve meaningful names as well, you know, he’s got those sharp ears and those big eyes, like he’s always looking for something-”

“You named the first one Biscuit.”

“I thought it was cute!”

Francis rolled his eyes and went back to work. Arthur eyed him as he threw Arthur’s laptop open, with long painted fingernails clacking on the keys.

“I hardly think it’s that important, Francis.” Arthur scoffed. Curiosity gnawed at the pit of Arthur’s stomach, but Francis didn’t need to know that. 

See, all Francis would need to know was that Alfred Jones, that annoyingly attractive American YouTuber, was nothing more than an insignificant part of Arthur’s YouTube career. Arthur’s subscribers had brought Alfred to Arthur’s attention, and Arthur had done what he did best, what his viewers liked best. He’d reacted to Alfred’s videos.

Besides, it was shockingly easy to make fun of Alfred, just as it was to poke fun at any gaming YouTuber, really. Arthur never had understood the hype.

He recalled almost groaning at the thought of having to watch Alfred’s videos to find something to talk about. He’d clicked on them reluctantly. He wasn’t exactly eager to spend his time watching something he knew for a fact he wouldn’t enjoy, even if it was for the sake of his ‘career’.

He supposed he’d judged the book by its cover, but that form of evaluation almost always worked when it came to gaming YouTubers. They were all the same. With their same, screamy, juvenile content. Their same ‘squads’ playing games together, their same scripted content. Arthur never understood how they gained so many subscribers.

And there had been no plot twist, no sudden realization that, wow, I’d misunderstood this Alfred Jones all along! Because Arthur had truly hated the first video he’d seen. 

That particular video had been Alfred and his mates playing a game with commentary voiced over. It had been dreadful to watch, so painfully boring. Arthur never understood how it could be entertaining to watch others play a game and not actually play it yourself.

Arthur had, however, smiled a little- maybe a little- at some of Alfred’s light humor, sprinkled in between censored curse words and loud laughter. That was all.

It wasn’t until he’d watched a video with Alfred’s actual face in view that everything struck him. 

The other video had the game in full view with a small window in the corner where Arthur could see Alfred and his friends playing. He’d skipped to the middle to watch it and left almost a minute after, so Arthur hadn’t gotten to see that deliciously strong jawline in clear view, full lips parting for dimpled grins, broad shoulders clad in that sweatshirt of his.

Suddenly, Arthur found it difficult to piece together his argument. He was at a loss for words when words were the things he desperately needed to conjure up- dry-humored, cynical words, ones that had never failed to entertain his viewers. 

Well, it was easy to draft something vicious, of course. Arthur never ran dry on ways to insult a person, but he needed to find something… genuine.

Arthur liked to think his videos were an extension of him. Nothing was scripted. He’d just talk and talk and edit out the rough parts, but it seemed everything he had to say about Alfred was a rough part. He’d gone on for minutes flaming Alfred’s content in front of his camera until it had figuratively laid in simmering ashes at Arthur’s feet, but when Arthur re-watched the footage, he felt something missing. 

He didn’t know what.

It was strange, considering that Alfred had an enormous amount of content, which meant more for Arthur to talk about. That meant it would be easier to find material for a reaction video, right?

Arthur’s research had started out with a wide sweep of the channel. He could’ve easily poked fun at just the amount of playlists the lad had- it seemed he made a video about everything.

There was a gaming channel. Arthur had passed that one almost immediately, not wanting to torture himself any longer. He’d already had enough to say about those videos.

There was a… conspiracy theory channel? Arthur had paused upon seeing that, wondering if his eyes deceived him. He’d clicked onto it to find videos about faked moon landings, Mandela effects, theories as to how the world would end- Alfred seemed to be very well versed in his research.

“Hey guys,” Alfred started all his conspiracy videos with chilling music. Arthur liked to pretend it never got to him, but he had clicked out of the video that night and watched it the next morning, in broad daylight. “I have a brand new conspiracy to talk about and- wow, I honestly could not see anything the same after researching it.”

That low, husky voice Alfred put on for the videos, Alfred’s knowledge on the matter- it gave Arthur... mad-scientist vibes. Arthur hadn’t known he’d been blushing profusely until he’d clicked out of the video and taken a break for a quick glass of water.

Arthur couldn’t help his attraction to the strangest little things. He had a thing for tourists, for conspiracists, for glasses, for a nice tall build, and Alfred was inconveniently all of those. Alfred was annoyingly, incredibly, attractive, and there was no denying it.

But hell, Arthur found many things attractive. Even Francis was attractive (which was something Arthur would never tell him) but that had never stopped Arthur from making fun of him.

So yes, Arthur found ample things to discuss in his video, but he had never been content with a single take. In fact, he’d contemplated giving up on the idea, but he couldn’t afford to pass up on making a video that almost guaranteed viewer satisfaction, what with the sheer amount of Twitter posts, YouTube comments, Instagram DMs and whatnot that practically begged Arthur to consider Alfred Jones.

He would simply have to make it work. He’d scanned his thirteenth take, in which he’d been sitting in front of the camera with a sneer on his lips. “I don’t know just how offended I should be that you lot selected someone so unbelievably annoying, so humorless, so-”

And Arthur had winced, just a little. Despite the fact that his viewers adored his rant videos, Arthur didn’t have the heart to be so cruel this time. At least not without some sort of filter. Besides, he wasn’t exactly keen on having Alfred Jones superfans flooding his comment section.

So Arthur had found a comfortable middle-ground. He indulged his viewers in the mockery while diluting it for the sake of diplomacy- er, however much diplomacy could be managed with a Reaction YouTuber’s videos.

“As pretty of a face as he does have, I’d still never subject myself to his mind-numbingly boring and clichéd content, nor would I subject myself to a date with someone with a loud, annoying, cookie-cutter online personality.”

Arthur wasn’t wrong. Alfred was attractive, and Arthur had been pleased with the take. It hadn’t been too harsh. It had just the right amounts of everything, just enough not to make Arthur feel too guilty. After all, he complimented Alfred! Even if it was just a little.

It also helped that Alfred wasn’t there in person. Arthur doubted he could say anything remotely rude in front of those big blue eyes.

… or maybe he could. Arthur didn’t know. That was the whole point of the situation, because Alfred was a YouTuber on Arthur’s laptop screen. It didn’t feel real. It made it all the more easier for Arthur.

It also didn’t help that Alfred was predictable as well. When Alfred had replied, it was as Arthur had expected. It was like a game of chess. It was hardly two people in a petty fight- Arthur assumed that if this were in person, that was what it would be. But because it was online, it felt like a battle, a war.

See, he’d learned a lot from dating a popular MUA, and it was that YouTube interactions between two well-known creators were hardly ever just an interaction. It was a tactic. It carried benefits.

When Alfred had said, “Besides, I’d never date anyone who can spend that much time complaining on camera”, Arthur had raised his brows. He’d checked the comment section to find some of Arthur’s subscribers meagerly defending him. How cute.

He’d checked his twitter to find the brewings of a feud. Subscribers of Alfred’s fought ones of Arthur, subscribers of both were eager for more. Oh god, Arthur had even found hate-to-love fanfiction-

The viewers were not letting this go. Therefore, Arthur would not be letting this go. He would not be sparing Alfred Jones.

It seemed Alfred wouldn’t be sparing Arthur either. Arthur checked his messages as Francis searched for Alfred’s latest video, one he absolutely had to watch, apparently, because Arthur’s first message had been from an ex-roommate that Arthur still kept in contact with, Bharat:

Have you seen it????

Another had been from his older brother, Allistair:

Watch the new vid, am honestly cryin HAHA its what you get fer fuckin round on yt all the time

And two others had been from Francis:

MDR did you see??

I’m coming over I’m almost there

It seemed Alfred wasn’t sparing Arthur either, because Arthur found his expression contorting into one of pain every second of Alfred’s latest video, wondering what exactly on God’s green earth was Alfred’s plan. 

It was unpredictable, and Arthur never made his next move until he knew what his opponent was up to.

Francis had let the cursor hover over a video on the trending page titled ‘Why Arthur Kirkland Should Date Me’. Arthur’s eyebrows had shot up. “Wh… what?”

Francis had clicked the video with a smirk. “Trust me, it gets worse.”

“Hey, what’s up you guys! I’m back again with another video.” A chipper Alfred said on the screen. “I’m gonna assume you all know why I’m making this. A YouTuber I’d never seen before- and trust me, I would never have forgotten a face like that if I had.” Alfred winked. 

Arthur choked on air. Francis bit back a smile. 

“He’s been dragging me to hell and back, and his recent video was particularly interesting to me.”

A thumbnail link of the video popped up on the screen. Well, at least, Arthur was getting some advertisement.

“Come on now, dude, this isn’t kindergarten! For a guy that spent a good ten minutes talking about how childish I am, you’re not so much better yourself.”

Arthur had frowned quizzically, not entirely sure of where the message had been going.

“You think I’m hot, I think you’re hot-”

What.

“I mean, I’ll look past the huge eyebrows and the fact that you wear the same type of sweater in all your videos, if you can look past my cookie-cutter online personality. I took the liberty to make a video just for you, in the hopes that you’ll just drop the act and slide into my DMs.”

Arthur furrowed his brows. Alfred was a clever lad. A clever, clever lad, it seemed, because, well, this was Alfred’s plan. If Arthur made another, normal reaction video, there would be no changing of the fact that millions of viewers now thought Arthur was some schoolgirl with a crush, some schoolgirl in denial.

Arthur watched the scene cut to Alfred lifting weights in the low, orangey light of a gym-

“I work out!”

-then, to Alfred on some sort of gymnastic mat, doing impressive backflips and other... bendy things, “I’m flexible if you know what I mean.”

Arthur watched, red-faced, as Alfred winked on screen. The scene then switched to Alfred playing with a pet- a fat, fluffy white cat with brown ears. “I saw in a video that you liked cats. I have one too! His name’s Hero!”

That bit was predictable. It was easy to see that the Alfred was a comic book buff from the figurines that lined the room he filmed in, the posters on his walls.

Now, Alfred was on a couch, scrolling his phone with a big, cheesy smile. “I just googled your height, and I think you’d fit just perfectly in my arms. People tell me I’m real warm.”

This was ridiculous. Surely Alfred had to know that! Arthur’s cheeks burned red in embarrassment. He was suddenly aware of Francis’ presence, those blue, mocking, laughing eyes of his drilling into Arthur’s mortified body.

And finally, much to Francis’ glee and the twist in the pit of Arthur’s stomach, Alfred took off his sweatshirt. He took off the shirt underneath it, displaying a deliciously tanned expanse of toned muscle. Alfred grinned cheekily, and Arthur felt his insides flutter. “And last of all, because this is what’s under my sweatshirt.”

“That bastard,” Arthur muttered as the video came to an end. “I- I don’t even know what he… that cheeky bastard.”

“I say you accept his proposal,” Francis joked. Arthur ignored him.

“I’ve got to do something, Francis. I can’t just let him- I… I need to match his play, but I can’t just do something like this, God knows I don’t have that in me!”

“Stop blubbering. Does it always have to be a play with you?” Francis scoffed, “Maybe he likes you.”

“Oh come on,” Arthur rose from the couch, taking to pacing in his living room, “He’s doing this for views and I know it. Fans go crazy over gay subtext like this.”

“It’s hardly sub-text.”

Arthur ignored him again. “I’m not going to let myself be ridiculed like this.”

Arthur filmed a new video the next week, in which he’d taken to coming up with a list, similar to Alfred. He’d filmed in various locations, similar to Alfred. Arthur matched the play.

“Sometimes I box after a stressful day,” Arthur had said as Francis filmed him in the ring, boxing glove-clad hands poised up, “I can quite easily knock a tooth out.”

The scene switched to Arthur sifting through his mail. “I’ve got all these bills that I’m paying with my job. In case you’re not sure what that is, it’s an adult responsibility. To put it into terms you might understand, my job is like a… um, quest that I complete to gain coins, money, um… V-Bucks, so I can pay for ‘cool stuff’! Like rent! And it’s very important, so I’d rather not be bothered with children dragging my name into videos for viewer satisfaction.”

And there was much, much more. Oh, so much more. Arthur titled the video ‘Why Alfred Jones Should Fuck Off’ and posted it with a smug smile on his lips.

It was trending a week later.

Arthur scrolled through his email notifications absentmindedly, watching his subscriber count grow, as his free hand stroked Biscuit on his lap.

See, Arthur could admit that all the new subscribers did make him feel a little bit nice. Maybe that made him slightly egotistical. He liked to see his email chock full of the notifications. He liked to scroll through them, when he had nothing else to do, and recently, he’d had quite a few in his inbox. With the time he’d taken off work, he’d also had quite a few moments in his day when he had nothing else to do.

He then paused. He blinked. His lips curved up in a slight smile.

Alfred Jones has subscribed to you on YouTube!

[fictionalwonder]

Hemlock Grove: Silly, Gory, Netflix Filler:

The last thing I was looking to watch was another vampire or werewolf drama but there was something about the Twin Peaks meets True Blood set-up, alongside the scare powered production credentials of horror director/actor/producer Eli Roth, that made me curious about Hemlock Grove. All twelve episodes of season one dropped April 2013 on NetFlix but in my world though it failed to net any of the buzz of say House of Cards or Orange is the New Black, I discovered Hemlock Grove long after the fact but it seems just in time before season two. Lack of an instantaneous fandom is not necessarily an immediate reflection on the quality of a show. It's all too easy to get lost in the binge watching shuffle of the current tv buffet. Many a tv gem has taken their time to build to a critical mass of appreciation; case in point Breaking Bad and Orphan Black who eventually met popularity on the slow audience build. However, by episode two of Hemlock Grove I realized just how narrow the demographic of whom it might appeal to really was. Someone will appreciate it though especially camp horror fans who like their gore mixed with a little or a lot of silly.

Based on the novel by Brian McGreevy,the story about a creepy family in a creepy town is well-tread territory, and Hemlock Grove is an unabashed mash-up of Dark Shadows, True blood and Twin Peaks. It wears those inspirations as much on its sleeve as it does inspirations from Poe, Lovecraft and Shelly. And it's the later that Hemlock Grove really is the 2014 spawn of with its gothic tones and grisly horror matched by broody model pretty teens, deceitful adults and lots of mangled bodies.

Things open with the horrific murder of a local girl, and it lets us know we're in for a pretty gruesome ride. The story unravels slowly though, and it really isn't until the third episode that the body is discovered, and the stakes are raised. Until then we spend a lot of time becoming familiar with this small Pennsylvanian town, its sinister residents and the moody melodrama that makes up town life.

Famke Janssen plays wealthy widow Olivia Godfrey, who one character calls the “most despised woman” in town. Famke plays her as a Jessica Rabbit meets Maude Addams femme fatal who slinks around dripping with lots and lots of mystery; the biggest of which is where her accent could possibly be from. It might be British, maybe it's Eastern European; whatever the intention it was an interesting choice by Janssen. I’m still not sure if it's bad acting or a genius character move but everytime she opens her mouth with another"dahling"it kind of stops me in my tracks. By the time they delivered the obligatory flashback, it made just as little sense. Part of Olivia Godfrey's infamy comes from being a major shareholder of the "nobody knows what the hell goes on in there" Godfrey Institute of Bio Medical Research. She is also busy carrying on an affair with one of the Institute's other shareholders, Norman Godfrey, played by Dougray Scott, who is the married brother of Olivia's late husband, who had committed suicide after the birth of their third child.

Olivia's sexy creepy gene is quite evidently passed on to her broody chain-smoking man-child son, Roman Godfrey, who she is just a little too close to. Played by Bill Skarsgård, another one of Stellan Skarsgård's offspring quick on his brother's heels as a sexy bad boy with vampiric tendencies, he does a good job of inhabiting Roman’s perversion and compassion. We know tow things about him from the get go: he has a kinky bloodlust, and he loves his sister dearly, a deformed giant who speaks through her smart phone. Roman eventually fosters a kind of bromance with town newcomer, lone wolf Peter Rumancek. Played by Landon Liboiron with Lili Taylor (always a welcome site) as his hard-living nomadic mother. Peter's friendship with Roman actually provides one of the most interesting relationships to watch on the show if not on tv in general. And it is their Scooby Doo meets Supernatural adventures that brings everything to a head over the twelve episodes.

Somehow connected to it all is the mysterious Godfrey Bio-Medical Research Institute that is so mysterious even owner Olivia doesn't know what the hell goes on inside. To her credit she admits she doesn't really care. Who does know is creepy head-scientist Dr. Johann Pryce, actor Joel de la Fuente - who just oozes mad scientist under his too polite bureaucratic persona. The rest of the cast includes Battle Star Galactic alumni, Kandyse McClure as the hard drinking god fearing wildlife/monster hunter Dr. Clementine Chasseur, and her fellow former BSG regular Aaron Douglas as the thick-skulled town sheriff and father of two perfectly bitchy but funny twin daughters.

Hemlock grove unravels at a slow pace, and characters often say I feel like something is about to happen and so too does the viewer. All the creepy violin music, the forboding stares and threatening vibes inevitably do devolve into a more talk than action type of story-telling. On a better written show like True Detective, where the sinister atmospherics and eccentric characters get equally compelling verse, it can work. Hemlock, however, trips over its own dialogue, which is disjointed and clichéd at best. One character actually alludes to the lycanthropy of another by saying, “One had to step in before things got too hairy.” Really!? At least there was some sense to made of the line for all its punniness unlike the stream of consciousness that produced, "There are dreams sir that you wake up with teeth marks and then there is the smell of coffee.” If you know what that means, please leave in the comments below. It seems odd to get nit-picky by lines of dialogue but in Hemlock Grove's defense the nonsensical nature of the writing is actually what kind of makes it fun to watch.

Hovering between the youthful face of CW and the skinmax lite of HBO, Hemlock Grove wanders less down the road of Twin Peaks or True Blood and more into Once Upon A Time meets Edgar Allen Poe territory. While it sets out to tackle the super compelling theme of the monster within, by half way through the first season it devolves into a hypothetical what if Dracula, the werewolf, and Frankenstein's monster all went to high school together. An r-rated Smallville for horror fans, by the time the story stumbles into crazy town by episode eight. which indulges in way too many dream sequences, the mounting nonsense accumulates to the point where either you succumb, sticking around out of sheer curiosity to just what kind of crazy will happen next, or you turn it off.

Being a child of Eli Roth who found fame as the father of the Hostel franchise, you would expect gore, and it happens only so often but when it does face ripping and intestines spilling are par for the course. Hemlock Grove has received some well-earned note for the best screen refresh on werewolf transformations, which Roth admits was American Werewolf in London inspired. Overall though things are really more gory than scary, and if it's horror you're thinking about, the dialogue is a far worse offender.

Series composer Nathan Barr and Lisa Richardson as the music supervisor do a good job cementing the soundscape, which swings between sub woofer throb intros, mournful violin cues and completely left field song choices. It actually fits quite well with the kind of moody cray cray camp that Hemlock Grove is. Doing to Gothic horror stories what One Upon A Time does to fairy-tales but in a far sexier, and if you believe it even sillier fashion, Hemlock Grove is just weird enough to cut it for a rainy weekend binge view or horror filled pre slumber night cap.

Overall I'd say A for effort but C for execution giving it a in 2.8 out of 5

Trigger warning for rape, extreme cat danger and teen romance

[mollymauk-teafleak]

The night we shared for the first time + hamliza (bc who else) please?

Here it is, the AU you’ve all been waiting for! 

Best Friends and a Baby AU!

(Also, seeing as it’s my birthday, if you fancy giving me an amazing, completely free of charge present you could always leave a comment on this or any of my fics on Ao3! And for the more affluent, I have a ko-fi)

Forthe second time in as many weeks, Alexander Hamilton found himself on aspectacularly, singularly uncomfortable chair, looking at his best friend withan utterly staggered expression in his wide, brown eyes and straining his earsthrough the ambient chatter around him in the vain hope that he’d just misheardand she didn’t just say what he thought she’d said. It was a pretty damnspecific situation to be in but it was one that he was starting to find eerilyfamiliar; one he assumed with a sinking heart he wasn’t through with.

“I’msorry, it’s how much?” he stressed, his hands shifting restlessly in thedeep pockets of the hoodie he wore, a nervous, fidgeting tic he’d been doingsince he took his seat in the waiting room and hadn’t stopped or even slowed.

Elizasighed deeply, tiredly and pulled the stiff pamphlet the doctor had just givenher out from under her arm and pushed it across the seat between them towardsAlex, the relevant page open so she wouldn’t have to say it again and tastethat sour disappointment.

“Fuckinghell,” Alex winced at the sight of the figures almost apologetically printed onthe page, a breakdown of all the medications needed and the consultanciesrequired and the procedures involved, each with its own piece of stone to addto the enormous boulder of a sum at the very bottom line.

“Yeah.That about sums it up,” Eliza allowed with a forced shrug, “And I’d have totake time off work too. For yet more hospital appointments.”

“Oh,”Alex grunted, biting his lower lip and freeing one hand from his cavernoussweater to play with his hair, a sure sign that he’d shifted onto a whole otherplane of anxiety. He knew how much Eliza despised hospitals, it was a miracleand a testament to how much she wanted this that she was even here today, “That…that sucks.”

‘Sucks’felt like it fell a few thousand miles short of what this situation was. Alex’sstomach felt like it had detached from whatever biological skulduggery held itin place and was bouncing loose inside his stomach, the sensation someone wouldprobably have if they’d been riding one of those proper skull-shattering,skeleton-rearranging roller coasters for two weeks straight. Which was prettymuch exactly what Alex had been experiencing, albeit in more of an emotionalthan literal sense.

Hecouldn’t deny that the overwhelming emotion he’d felt when it had become clearthat his best friend didn’t intend for this to be one of their usual lunchdates where they spouted bile about their colleagues who were driving them upthe wall (mostly Alex) or entertained with stories of what ridiculous RichPeople Shit their family had pulled this week (exclusively Eliza), the emotionthat ruled his mind in that instant was fear. He refused to feel guilty forthat and knew Eliza wouldn’t expect it of him. How else was he supposed toreact when the girl whose right-hand man he’d been since the very first day ofcollege, when he’d made an admittedly shaky but impactful first impression bywalking into her and spilling black coffee down the both of them, took hishands across their usual table at their favourite place to eat in the city andasked him in that firm but quiet voice of her’s if he’d mind having a baby withher. She genuinely did phrase it like that, of course she did.

She’dclarified a little better after Alex had recovered from choking on his soda andspending ten minutes hacking and spluttering loud enough to turn most otherheads in the cafe towards them. Her eyes had grown anxious and her cheeks hadturned pink as she’d insisted that she wasn’t asking anything of him but asperm donation, she’d thought about this so carefully and agonised over it formonths, she couldn’t think of anyone better than him, she trusted him, if hedidn’t want to be involved with…what it produced, no obligation at all, ofcourse she’d understand…

Allwhile Alex felt like someone had whipped away the classy hardwood floorsunderneath his feet and left him spiralling through empty space. Memories he’dhoped to never feel invading his brain again were piling up faster than hecould tip them back down into the darker recesses of his mind, giving him thesensation of swarms of spiders clambering and skittering over him, gettingunder his skin. The word father didn’t have amazing connotations forAlex, it never had, but he’d been able to avoid it for a long time while he wasat college and law school, only getting the slightest roiling stomachs andsweaty palms and lips chewed until they bled when his friends would talk abouttheir children, Lafayette and Martha and even John would talk of his daughteroften and fondly. Of course, the panic would only last until he actually metthe little sprogs, they were all cute and funny and liked how their Tio Alexkept marker pens in his pockets so they could colour in his tattoos; theanxiety never held up long after that but there would still be that twinge deepin his stomach at the word alone. He wasn’t sure that was ever going away butat least it was small enough to cope with.

Andthere he was in the middle of the cafe, trying to hide a goddamn riot behind agrin that was turning into a grimace and eyes that were far too shiny to beconsidered normal. And somewhere in the middle of it all, while his back wasturned and his brain occupied with damage control, with putting out as manysmall fires on the inside of his skull as he could before it could turn into aconflagration, a ‘yes’ slipped past his gritted teeth.

Bothhim and Eliza had been utterly stunned by that, nothing passing between thembut a shared look of slack, wide eyed surprise. Alex hadn’t even been awarethat there was a ‘yes’ lurking somewhere, battling its way through his anxiety,through beating winds and raging storms to climb off his tongue ahead of thefrantic screech that oh fuck, he just remembered he’s parked by a meter and heleft his iron on at home and he doesn’t speak English and he only has two moreseconds to live, please excuse him…

Butit had worked so hard to get there…so he supposed that was his answer?

Sohere Alex was, being confronted with the damnable highway robbery that was theAmerican medical system and trying to platonically make a baby with his bestfriend. What exactly his game plan was in the moment his…stuff mixed up withEliza’s…stuff and made…more stuff and he was technically no longer neededaccording to the laws of biology, of that he wasn’t exactly sure. He could tellEliza was wondering but she hadn’t pressed, she’d only began to cry and leaptacross the table to give him one of her patented, full body, vice tight hugsthat showed how much unexpected strength was in those delicate arms of her’s.Alex didn’t really think he deserved so much thanks, that he’d earned that lookof awe and adoration in her eyes when she looked at him ever since that fatefullunch date, just for saying yes to jacking off into a specimen cup. That’s allhe’d said a firm yes to. In the few weeks since that day, he’d been franticallycombing his mind for another scrap of certainty to present itself and tell himwhat his brain wanted but it seemed to have completely dried up after the firsttime. Which was pretty fucking rich of his brain, to get him into thissituation and then bail entirely, leaving him with just a terrifying, panicstreaked blankness.

Buthe was here. He loved Eliza, he wanted to help and he’d hold to his promise.Besides, it was only himself he was terrified over, he knew without a singleshred of doubt that Eliza would be a fantastic mother, so wonderful and perfectfor the job that it would be kind of criminal to deprive a child of being bornbelonging to her. Maybe that love and assurance would be enough to cancel outhis contribution…

“Howis it so expensive?” Alex exclaimed, reading the paper again like he could willit to be more palatable, “I mean…isn’t it just like a fancy turkey baster?”

Elizascrewed up her face, making her nose that could only be described in that clichédbut sweet way as ‘button’ crinkle adorably, “Ew, Alex.”

“I’mpretty sure that’s what it is,” Alex crossed his arms defensively, “I did do myreading.”

Hehad, in fact. Alexander Hamilton didn’t do anything without researching itfully first.

Elizaran her fingers through her hair, twisting it into curtains around her facelike she always did when she was stressed, “Well…I guess we can’t do thisright now.”

Alexwinced. He’d love to offer to cover the cost of the procedure, hell even halfof it would do, but college and law school had left him with a crippling amountof debt and not an awful lot else. He’d arrived on his very first day with nextto nothing and had somehow come out the other side with even less.

“Couldyou ask your parents?” he suggested, not liking the idea even as it came out ofhis mouth but he just wanted to do something to take that devastated look offher face.

Elizalooked down at her hands, retreating even more into the sanctuary of her hair,“Um…I would but…they aren’t really fans of the idea.”

Thatjarred him. Not only was Eliza making this huge decision, and entrusting awhole huge chunk of her future happiness to him, she was doing it without thesupport of her parents. Alex wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first timein the twenty-six years she’d been alive that such a thing had happened.

“Oh…”Another thought closed up his throat and made his fingers tense into fists,“Are they…not fans of the whole idea or of the fact that it’s gonna be mybaby?”

Eliza’seyes widened, ‘Oh! Oh, no, no it’s not that, I promise. They’ve not liked itfrom the start, I told them I was thinking about it a while ago and well…thereaction wasn’t great. They just don’t get it.” Her voice grew so faint and sadat the end, her eyes dropping, her tone resigned but as if she’d still hopedfor better in spite of the evidence.

“I’m sorry, Bets…” Alex murmured in as soft a voice as he could evermanage, reaching across and taking her hand, gently moving it from pulling ather hair to clasping it in his lap with both of his own. If there was anyonewho understood general parental shittiness, it was him.

“Hey,it’s okay,” Eliza said, smiling with her usual quiet bravery, “I don’t mind.This is just a setback, right? We can come back to this in… I don’t know, ayear or so. Less if I let my car finally die and start roller-skating aroundNew York. Hey, maybe I’ll have an even more stable job and this will turn outto be for the best?”

“Morelike you’ll find a much better sperm source,” Alex lifted an eyebrow, smilingcrookedly.

“Hey…”Eliza socked him lightly on the arm, “Stop that. I don’t want anyone else, youknow that.”

Alexchuckled, appreciating the lengths she’d go to in defending him from himself,in silent awe of her which, in fairness, was how he spent most of his timearound Eliza. But he knew that face. He’d seen that face at 2am when they’dbeen sharing a cab back from the bar and she’d stuck her head out of the windowto see the lights rushing by and feel the wind in her hair. He’d seen that faceat half past eight, with thirty minutes to go before their final exam, blearyeyed with wild bird nest hair and a look of fierce, caffeine fuelleddetermination the likes of which he’d never seen. He’d seen it illuminated fromwithin like there was some kind of power source behind her eyes that otherpeople didn’t seem to have, a kind of sun that worked on pure joy and wonder,so bright that it could even warm someone like him. He’d seen that face nearlyevery day of his life for the past six years and he knew how to read it.

Andright now, he could see plain as day that Eliza was devastated.

She’dlooked so excited, that joy there again, as she’d taken him through all thethinking and daydreaming she’d done about this, how she’d known the time wasright now that she’d gotten herself a low paying but at least steady job, doingsome kind of clerk or data stuff type for one of the orphanages in town. It hadthe right hours, she could advance in time and with the time she’d beenspending with Dosia’s two boys and Martha’s little Frances and the gaggle ofkids Laf had been producing since the scarily young age of eighteen, she justwas so certain that this was what she wanted. And a year was a hell of a longtime to wait for something you wanted that badly.

Maybeit was that thought, that desperate need to offer her some kind of help, orelse pure and simple stupidity, the rise of his chronic and terminal foot inmouth disease, that made Alex say what he then said next. Or maybe it wassomething else entirely. Maybe, and this was a pretty shaky maybe, it was hisown want for this crazy, insane thing to happen. Maybe it was the fact that, asterrified and confused as this whole thing had made Alex at the start, rightnow? The thought of having to let go of the idea was more than he could bear.

So,he said it.

“Well,why don’t we just do things the old-fashioned way?” he tilted his head, tonelight and airy but there was no solid evidence that he was joking, “You andme?”

Elizalooked at him, a snarky comeback loaded and ready to go on her tongue but whenshe saw his face, her face became a mask of comic surprise.

“Theold-fashioned way?” she asked in a voice that was half scandalised, halfastounded, “As in…like…that.”

“Sex,Eliza, yes,” Alex filled in the gap for her, “You and me. Having sex. To make ababy. That is how it’s worked for thousands of years so…”

Elizagaped at him, reminding Alex of something his mama used to say, about closingyour mouth before you started catching flies. Absurdly calm, enough to reachover and delicately bringing her lower jaw up to close her lips, Alex smiledbemusedly. There didn’t seem to be any flies in here but you could never be toocareful.

“Imean…” he clarified, “This is something people do, right? They hook up forreasons other than, y’know, that they’re in a relationship. Platonic like. I’mnot gonna lie and say I don’t find you attractive, certainly enough to get thejob done. I may be setting myself up for a Mike Tyson blow to the ego here butI think I know you well enough, Bets, to say that you feel the same about me.”

“Butit’s…” Eliza found some words, if fragmented and scattered, “I… I do and I…I know what you’re talking about but…I do love you, Alex…but it’sweird!”

Alexpursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, “As weird as asking your friend todonate sperm?”

Elizaflushed a little, “Okay, smarty pants. Now we’re even.”

Hechuckled, noting that she still hadn’t taken her hand back from his own, shehadn’t moved away from him, “It is weird. But it makes a lot of sense, doesn’tit? We’re both single and young and pretty damn good looking and, mostimportantly, we care a whole damn lot about each other. And you’d get a baby,free of charge with no hospital fuckery required.”

Elizapercolated the logic in her head for awhile, Alex did always have a gift forselling his utterly madcap, bonkers ideas in a way that made them seem like thebest option for everyone involved. And she’d never seen him be wrong yet…notcompletely anyway.

And,if she was being completely honest with herself? At the thought of a night withAlex, freshman Eliza had perked up considerably and was currently bouncing onthe balls of her feet. Her crush on him had been intense, with it being hervery first and all, but it had settled with age as they both grew and maturedand the whole thing that once very possible could have been just neverhappened. Alex was the best friend she’d ever known outside of her family,someone who understood her completely inside and out and somehow still wantedto know more.

She’dalways love him and she was dizzyingly excited at the possibility of being amother. Ever since Alex had said yes, she’d been daydreaming of a tiny littlething who curled into her chest looking for love and safety that she was sowilling to give in staggering amounts, something beautiful that she could lookat with pride and know they would always belong to her and her to them. Herlittle piece of the universe. And yes, with Alex’s wry smile and thirst tolearn and to persevere through anything. The slight weirdness of having sexwith her best friend would be well worth that price.

Andwith half the stuff she and Alex had been through together, what was seeingeach other naked? What was a little roll in the sheets between friends?

“Okay,”Eliza had to laugh a little as she said it, feeling like a character in asitcom about to cut to commercial, “Just to get me pregnant.”

Herlaugh was infectious, soon Alex was giggling helplessly too. It was hard notto.

“Hey,it’s not even that weird, right?” he snorted, muffling his laughter in hissleeve so they didn’t get any more suspicious glances from the nurses andpatients around them, “Just think of it as me loaning you ten dollars. Except,y’know, instead of money, picture my penis…”

Elizalaughed even harder then, so hard tears began building in her eyes, “I thinkI’d rather not.”

“Well,yes, it’s a terrible metaphor,” he chuckled, “But in my defense, this situationis pretty damn rare.”

Thatwas certainly true. Rare and wild and risky. But that was kind of how Alex andEliza had always operated.

Elizashifted a little closer, only looking cuter red in the face and glittery in theeye from laughter, her hands knotting together with Alex’s, “You really are thebest friend ever, Hamilton.”

“Hey,let’s reserve all accolades until you’ve seen my moves, okay?” Alex chuckled,grinning that way he did that made the corners of his eyes crinkle up. But hestill kissed her cheek as they got up to leave, “And you’re my best friend evertoo. Which is exactly why you get the privilege of seeing me naked.”

“Oh,shut up, Hamilton,” Eliza grinned, “I take it back. Now, come on and knock meup.”

Alexscrewed up his face, trying not to dissolve into hysterics again, “Your placeor mine?”

Theanswer to that question was obviously Eliza’s place. Alex had a little cornerof the heights where you could touch both walls at once by stretching out yourarms and the whole thing rattled whenever the elevated train rushed past, insuch a way that all the furniture was rearranged when it was gone. That and itwas inhabited by Alex himself, who’d turned it into a nightmarish hoarder’snest. Not exactly the most sexy of locations, there were no pornographic filmsset amongst stacks of books threatening to fall over and boxes full of halfeaten pizza and groaning folders of case files fit to burst.

So,Eliza’s it was.

Bothof them let out twin sighs of relief once Eliza had put a glass of wine in eachof their hands, it made things feel a little easier. There was a thick pull oftension in the air, one that threatened the whole madcap operation until theycaught each other’s eye in the middle of a slightly stilted conversation on howAlex’s last few job interviews had been going (Eliza had been coaching him forevery single one). Then they both just bust out laughing.

“Idon’t think the whole ignoring the elephant in the room thing is working?” Alexgrinned, rubbing the back of his neck, “Want to just call it what it is and dothe damn thing?”

Elizasnorted, nearly getting rose right up her nose, “And would ‘the damn thing’ inthis case be me?”

Thatmade Alex laugh out loud, the tension in the pit of his stomach uncoiling andslithering away to hide, the way it always seemed to when Eliza was around,“Good thing this isn’t a date or I’d be out on my ass, huh?”

“Coursenot, I’d give you at least two more strikes,” she chuckles, “Though, to befair, if this was a date I wouldn’t be inviting you to my bedroom this early.Which I am about to do, heads up.”

“Thanks,”he smirked, clambering to his feet. He didn’t need Eliza to show him where herbedroom was, he’d slept over a good handful of times, after parties where Elizadeemed him too tipsy to get himself home.

Ithad to be said, the room was quintessentially Eliza. She couldn’t do much aboutthe faded carpet in the living room or the squat, leather sofas or the kitchencupboards that were the colour of phlegm, in Alex’s own words. But the bedroom,tucked away in the corner of the apartment with a window that looked out onto afire escape where she could perch on an evening and watch the sun sink belowthe New York skyline, leaving the stars free to come out, like a million eyesopening cautiously, only gleaming as bright as they could through the thick pollutionas soon as they saw the coast was clear. The room itself was a dusty blue, asoothing colour that seemed to wrap itself around you and keep you safe, thepalate broken only by the many, many photos of her loved ones on the wall (manyof them included Alex) and the rainbow of books and the bursts of green asflowering plants and succulents gathered like old friends embracing on everyspare surface. The quilt on her bed was the same one Alex remembered from herdorm room and every other place she’d lived since, the one she, of course, hadmade herself.

Thewhole scene was just so familiar to him as he stepped inside, trotting atEliza’s heels, so warm and safe and forgiving that he relaxed in spite of thefact that this was a step closer to go time. It was just that this room, maybein different locations but the same room in essence, had seen the absoluteworst of him- crying, having a panic attack, blind drunk, angry- and yet stillwelcomed him back.

Alot like Eliza herself.

“Okay,”Eliza spoke decisively, as if the awkwardness could be wrestled intononexistence by a firm word and a pair of crossed arms, “Kiss me. That’ll letme know if I actually want to do this or not.”

Alextilted his head a little, rolling the sleeves of his sweater up his arms, “ButI kiss you all the time?”

Andhe did, it was true, pecks on the cheek and forehead to make her smile when shewas feeling blue or in joyous awe after she yet again saved his ass with aperfectly timed up of coffee or one of her wonderfully simple solutions thatsomehow utterly fixed problems that he’d been chewing over for days.

“No,I mean…” Eliza searched for words, looking a little exasperated, “Kiss me likeyou’d kiss someone you really wanted to have sex with. Kiss me like…likesomeone you were dying to see naked, like you’re going to explode if you don’tget with them right this minute.”

Alexgave a little snort of disbelief but he stepped forward all the same andwithout another thought in his head, he brought his best friend close to him byway of firm hands on her shoulders and a swift, sure movement, pressing herlips to his, thinking of passion and love and want. He let his lips part alittle after a few moments, after she relaxed in his hold, tilting his head toclose just that little bit of unnecessary distance and was gratified to findher mirroring him. How long the kiss lasted, neither of them were really surebut it ended with both of them a little reluctant to let it go, leaving theundeniable answer as ‘not long enough’.

“So…”Alex murmured, a rasp in his voice.

“Yeah,”Eliza’s eyes were wide and her pupils seemed so big that Alex could fall intothem, “Yeah, I want to do this.”

Hesmiled that crooked smile of his though, underneath it, he was thinking thatthe kiss didn’t really feel all that different from any other time he’d kissedher, which was…disconcerting.

Theydecided to shed their clothes at the same time, in the interests of fairness.

Elizadiscovered that Alex had a lot more tattoos than she’d ever imagined, one’s hehad mentioned to her but she’d never seen with her own eyes, diminishing their expansiveness.Constellations scattered across his lower stomach, she’d seen them poking upabove the line of his pants when he stretched but she’d never realised how farthey reached, how detailed and beautiful in their simplicity they were. A papersailboat trekked bravely across his upper thigh, waves crashing around it, afeathered quill penned a long, looping line of ink up the length of one leg,smatterings of English, French and Spanish were carefully etched onto variousparts of him, curling around clocks and birds and flowers and a Puerto Ricanflag. He was a work of art.

Alexdiscovered a kind of roundness, a fullness, to Eliza around her hips, thighsand stomach. There were curves and slopes and valleys usually hidden underneathher clothes, a smattering of stretch marks he hadn’t known existed, a fewfreckles that moved up the inside of a thigh to places he couldn’t see fromhere but found himself desperately wanting to follow them. His fingers itchedto touch that softness, follow the curves and squeeze and stroke and kiss.

Itwas amazing what new things you could learn from someone with one glance andthe absence of clothes.

Elizahad read up on good positions for conceiving, where gravity could hopefullyplay its part, bringing all the right elements close enough together for thespark to catch and a baby to start forming, like the way dust and gas collectedinto stars under the same force. A pillow under her hips and sprawled backagainst the cushions, she felt a little silly but all Alex could think of wasthe intoxicating darkness of her hair against the sheer white pillows, the wayshe could look up at him as he moved to take his place between her knees, thesoftness now right there under him and nothing to stop him reaching out andcaressing it.

Noone needed to make any kind of verbal request now, their lips met entirely oftheir own accord, though it was Alex who started the gentle nipping at Eliza’slower lip, already a little drunk on kissing her full, slightly swollen,beautifully dusky pink lips, the spine tingling but not unwelcome sensation ofhis tongue sliding over her’s. Though it only took a few seconds before Elizawas responding in kind, her hands coming up to tangle in his thick, dark massof hair and keep him good and close.

Alexalmost made a total idiot out of himself and stopped to request a condom beforehe remembered the whole goddamn point of this and just went for it, needing toshuffle her over a little, raise his own hips, fumble just a tiny amount andthen he was there, with a low sighfrom himself and a short gasp of surprise from Eliza. He almost stopped, terrifiedhe’d caused some hurt, moved to fast, moved without permission, taken too muchtoo soon. But then Eliza’s legs were thrown around his hips, her feet pressinginto his lower back and pushing him, if anything, deeper.

Herteeth grazed his earlobe and she murmured in a tone that was nothing short ofbegging, “Please.”

Alexwasn’t about to make her ask twice. He didn’t think, he didn’t ask for anylogic or reason, he just chased this wild desire in his chest and the plea inhis friend’s voice. He rocked her, heavy and rhythmic, into the softness of themattress, never taking his eyes off her, not wanting to miss a second of theway she bit her lip and her eyes rolled back when he hit home and her pupils swelledand her face took on the achingly beautiful blush of fresh rose petals. It goteven better when his thumb, apparently of its own volition, slipped down andpressed none too lightly against her clit; that made her cry out loud, herexpression rapturous, panting as she climbed higher and higher under hm.

Assoon as he saw her getting there, the only thing he wanted to do in the wholedamn world was get her there faster, harder, better, the pace of his lithe hipsincreasing until the bed springs began to make themselves heard and Eliza’ssweet little gasps became louder and higher, melding into one wordless cry.Alex wasn’t even really aware that the low, wanton growl was his own, the onethat pitched so perfectly with the noises she was making. He just lost sight ofhimself in the pull of her muscles, the feeling of her fingers tugging at hishair, the beautiful heat where their bodies joined and his thumb rubbed.

Asdistracted as he was by what he was doing to her, what she was giving him inreturn, his own climax caught him by such surprise that Alex felt the wholeroom, the whole damn world, tip dizzily around him as his hips jerkederratically and he spent himself inside her. Though he didn’t miss Eliza cominga second or two behind him, writhing so uncontrollably that he was a littleworried for a moment, until the tension let them both go and they were leftexhausted and a little bit shaken.

Alexand Eliza both held their breath, waiting for the awkwardness to comebarrelling back with a vengeance, braced for it, Alex actually mapping outwhere he’d left his clothes so he could scramble back into them as swiftly aspossible and bolt for the door. But it never seemed to find them, like they’dsuccessfully held their breaths and stilled their bodies and it had just passedthem by.

Theyuntangled themselves as painlessly as they could, leaving Alex to roll onto hisback by Eliza’s side, both just catching their breath. At some point theirhands found each other and joined, subtly and gently, without either of themreally being aware of it. It was a long time before either of them saidanything.

“I…well,hopefully that worked,” Eliza found her voice first, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Yeah…”Alex began, short of breath, gazing straight ahead just like she was, like theyboth recognized that that was a safe place for their eyes to rest. Who knewwhat might happen if they went wandering? “Though…what are the chances that yougot pregnant back there?”

Elizablinked, her free hand fluttering unconsciously to her stomach, resting therelightly, “I’m not sure. Low, I guess, relatively speaking.”

Alexspoke as casually as he could, “Well then, it would make sense, wouldn’t it,if, y’know, as long as you were still ovulating, we…we kept doing that?”

Therewas a slight mutual wince as they both froze, waiting to see of what he’d justsaid had crossed the line, upset the painfully delicate balance they stood onhere. But there was no thunder, no sudden swarm of locusts, the earth didn’topen up underneath the bed. Nothing happened.

“Imean, it’s only logical,” Eliza murmured, “Yeah, why not?”

Evenas they (eventually) dressed and gathered themselves back together, it stillfelt like something important hadn’t been said, there was the feeling of a gapgoing unfilled, a missing step. It was still there as Alex stood on Eliza’sstoop, lingering as they said goodbye, both of them feeling this glaringabsence.

“Hey…”Eliza called out as Alex’s sneakers touched down on the sidewalk, reaching in asudden, frantic rush to fix the problem. But as Alex turned back, looking ather quizzically with his wide, brown eyes, she didn’t know what to say.

So,what she said was, “You know you’re my favourite person ever, right?”

Alexcracked a smile, chuckling gently, “Yeah. You’re my favourite too.”

Itwasn’t quite right. But it would do for now.

[tediousoscars]

2019

Predict-o-meter: This year: 9/11; Total: 108/134 (83%)

Welcome, welcome one and all to this year’s diatribe concerning all things Oscar.

With one glaring exception (see if you can spot it) this year’s class is solid with some soaring achievements at the top and a lot of really solid work through the middle.

So without further ado, let’s get to it ...

- THE CONTENDERS -

1917. In most war movies the MacGuffin is winning: a skirmish, a battle, a campaign, or, ultimately the war. In “1917” the goal is to call off an attack; to avoid a battle. Most war movies focus on the big picture: strategy, troop movements, etc. “1917” focuses on a single soldier embarking on a single mission for a single day. “1917” is not most war movies. The Germans have executed a strategic retreat and established a new defensive position. A zealous British commander is in hot pursuit, but Command has learned - through the new-fangled technology of aerial photography - that he is charging into a trap. No telegraph lines have yet been laid to the forward position, and radio is not quite a thing yet, so the only way to warn the commander is to send soldiers across no-man’s land, across the previous German line, across the French countryside to deliver the message in person. What follows is a quixotic quest full of constant fear and tension across a landscape made bizarre by the ravages and awful logic of war. It is a saga of commonplace heroism, of a man randomly plucked from obscurity, given an awesome, nigh-impossible task, and rising to the occasion for no other reason than it is his job. The film is expertly paced and while moments of sheer panic are rare, moments of relaxation are nonexistent. Though the time-honored message - war is hell - is definitely there, it is not driven home in the typical, ham-fisted way, and the final scene in which our hero collapses against a tree and gazes out at an idyllic sunlit pasture feels more triumphant than any victory brought about by explosions and bullets.

Jojo Rabbit. I often like to go into these films with no knowledge in order to avoid preconceptions, an approach that was a little jarring in this case, at least at first. In “Jojo Rabbit” director Taika Waititi creates a vivid, slightly out-in-leftfield world that will be familiar to fans of Wes Anderson (particularly “Moonrise Kingdom”). However, Anderson’s Boy Scouts have been replaced (as the vaguely authoritarian and hierarchical children’s organization central to the film) by the Nazi’s Hitler Youth. The opening scenes in which an excited 10yo Johannes "Jojo" Betzler bounces around his room in full Nazi regalia chattering away with his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (“C’mon, now ... Heil me!”), as he prepares for Nazi training camp are downright off-putting at a visceral level. For a second I thought I’d stumbled into an unironic production of “Springtime for Hitler.” But soon enough you realize that you are seeing the world through Jojo’s young eyes, and that he is a sensitive, insecure boy who is desperate for acceptance. Jojo uncritically accepts the worst Nazi propaganda about the Jews to the point that when he actually meets a Jewish girl he asks where her horns are (“They don’t grow in until you are 21,” she coyly replies). What follows is a complex tale of human drama told from a persistently childish (in the best sense of that word) perspective. The fact that it doesn’t just fly apart into an incoherent mess is a testament to Waititi’s skill as a director (WHY was he not nominated?) and a story that starts out uncomfortably off-putting ends up being thought-provoking and heartwarming. This film defies all expectation and should not be missed.

Little Women. A fresh take on a much-beloved classic, “Little Women” follows a family of 4 sisters through late childhood and early adulthood as they struggle with questions of marriage and career through the lens of an 18th-century culture that has quite definite opinions on these matters. The sisters are well cast and have good chemistry. Two of them - Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Florence Pugh as Amy - were nominated for their trouble. Throw in Laura Dern as Marmee and Meryl Streep as the irrepressible Aunt March and you’ve got a powerhouse cast that drives the film forward and keeps things lively. The storytelling is deft throughout, but for my money the best part is at the end when Jo suddenly and inexplicably agrees to marry a minor character from early in the film that she didn’t even seem to like. It all feels very out of character and more than a little deus ex machina, until the coda showing Jo haggling with her publisher over the publication of her book. When he insists that the main female character must be married (or dead, either is fine) by the end of the book, she reluctantly agrees but asks for more money in return. “If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money, I might as well get some of it,” she declares, adding a nice meta twist that makes Jo’s sudden nuptials not only understandable but downright delectable.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Director Quentin Tarantino (nominated) returns to a vein he previously mined in 2009’s “Inglorious Basterds”: The alternate-history black comedy. This time out, however, the group upon which he unleashes ahistorical vengeance is not the Nazis, but the Manson Family. Set in 1969 Hollywood in a reality not too far from our own, “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio in a nominated role) as an aging TV cowboy who flies to Italy to make Spaghetti Westerns in an attempt to salvage his career. His constant companion, stunt double, and manservant is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, also nominated), a man of immense talent, but no ambition, who is content to carry Rick’s water as long as it doesn’t interfere with his generally zen lifestyle. What follows is a fascinating character study of the two men as they navigate the politics of Hollywood. Rick, in particular, pursues relevance with the panicked desperation that only middle-aged white men can achieve. But the show is consistently stolen by Pitt’s portrayal of Cliff as some combination of ronin samurai and burnt-out hippy. In every situation Cliff knows exactly what to do and how to do it at the same time that his motivation seems to be little more than, “Well, why not?” It’s breathtaking to watch. The Manson Family, for their part, play a minor, oblique role through most of the film, only to fall victim to Tarantino’s signature cartoonish uber-violence in the film’s climax. Never before has someone being set on fire been this laugh-out-loud funny. “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” is like a rollercoaster: don’t over-analyze it, just enjoy the ride. And it is a very enjoyable ride.

Parasite. This is another film I walked into with no foreknowledge and ended up being very pleasantly surprised. “Parasite” is a film from Korea that at its core is about income inequality, but the lens that it uses to examine this phenomenon is unique. “Parasite” follows the Kims, a downtrodden, working-class family of four barely scraping by in the slums of Seoul. Son Ki-Woo is very smart, but can’t afford to attend college like his friend Min-Hyuk, so when Min-Hyuk has a chance to study abroad he asks Ki-Woo to pose as a college student and take over his position tutoring the daughter of the rich Park family. Ki-Woo does so, and through a series of increasingly hilarious hijinks the entire Kim family becomes employed by the Parks in different capacities. The contrast between the capable, sensible, but poor Kims and the clueless but rich Parks is played to maximal comic effect, and you think this is an enjoyable romp and you pretty much know where it’s going. When all of a sudden, in the middle of the second act, the entire film takes a jarring left turn and sends you careening into bizarre, unexplored territory. I won’t spoil it for you, but director Bong Joon Ho richly deserves his nomination for crafting such a compelling story that completely defies expectations.

- THE PRETENDERS -

Ford v Ferrari. This is the true story of how legendary driver and car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) teamed up with the Ford Motor Company to take on Enzo Ferrari and win Le Mans. Central to the effort is the cantankerous Ken Miles (played with verve and gusto by Christian Bale), a British driver and engineer who is obsessed with racing to the exclusion of almost everything else, especially social niceties. When an ambitious, young Lee Iacocca proposes that Ford buy the ailing Ferrari, only to be humiliated by Enzo himself, Henry Ford II (aka “The Deuce”) declares war on Ferrari’s beloved racing team and their dominance at Le Mans. Shelby is recruited as one of a very few Americans to have ever won that race, and he insists on bringing along Miles as one of the few people who share his burning, all-consuming passion for racing. But Ken’s brash, irreverent style conflicts with Ford’s corporate image, and there ensues a protracted battle between Shelby and “the suits.” This is all handled deftly. The interpersonal struggles are well-motivated and feel real, the racing scenes are exciting, and the ultimate, somewhat mixed climax feels very satisfying. Definitely a very good movie, just not a great one.

The Irishman. Pacino. De Niro. Pesci. Keitel. Scorsese. Must be a gangster movie. This time around Scorsese takes on True Crime by studying the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of one-time Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino in a nominated role that is more than a little ironic given Hoffa’s frequent anti-Italian tirades). The titular Irishman is Frank Sheeran (De Niro); a Teamsters driver, turned scam artist, turned Mob enforcer, turned Hoffa confidant and Union Local President. All of the clichéd gangster tropes are here: the steak dinners, the smoke-filled rooms, the bizarre, posturing pseudo-conversations where nothing is actually said, but everybody “gets the message,” the sudden, brutal violence. All of it. And it is all executed expertly, being second nature to this team by this point. But for my money the film really revolves around Sheeran’s daughter, Peggy (played by Lucy Gallina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult). Even as a child Peggy sees through the bluff and bluster of Mafia “honor” to its brutal core of senseless violence, and she holds her father in distain for it. This particularly rankles Sheeran’s Don and protector Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci, also nominated), whose lifelong efforts to curry favor with Peggy come to naught. And when Peggy takes a shine to Jimmy Hoffa, seeing him as an honorable man helping people live better lives, Russell’s knickers are well and truly twisted. After Hoffa’s disappearance (the film makes no mystery of it, but I won’t spoil it) Peggy and Frank become fully estranged. Towards the end of his life Frank feels compelled to make a furtive attempt at reconciliation, but offers no remorse nor even any understanding of why Peggy stopped talking to him in the first place. The film ends with Sheeran alone and forgotten in a nursing home, being interviewed by some FBI agents still desperately trying to close the Hoffa case. They point out to him that all of his compatriots are dead, running through a roll call of the characters we have been watching for the past two hours. “Who are you protecting?” they ask. Sheeran has no answer, but offers no assistance, for in the end his loyalty was all he ever had.

Joker. Not since 2012’s “Les Misérables” has a movie been as monotonously bleak as “Joker.” Purportedly the origin story of Batman’s nemesis, “Joker” is a Chinese water torture of debasement and degradation. There’s no real theme or plot; just drip drip drip of indignities piled one upon the other. For hours. The titular Joker doesn’t even emerge from the tortured psyche of Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix in a nominated role) until the film’s waning moments, and even then he is literally just a crazy clown with a gun; hardly a suitable foil for the Batman. Phoenix gamely portrays an abused, antisocial misfit, but the skill with which he applies his craft is not put to any greater purpose. There’s no redemption here, or even a moral, just misery piled upon a man who has always been miserable and always will be. Each year there are at least one or two nominations that I cannot understand. With “Joker,” not only do I fail to understand the nomination, I can’t even understand why it was MADE.

Marriage Story. Meet the Barbers, Charlie and Nicole. They are beautiful (looking exactly like Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson - both nominated) and accomplished: he a playwright and director in New York’s theater community, she a star of stage and screen and Charlie’s favorite leading lady. When Nicole is offered a TV pilot shooting in Hollywood she decides to take son Henry with her, but removed from Charlie’s directorial dictates and suffocating ambition she decides to never go back. What follows is a bi-coastal divorce proceeding and custody battle that pits two people against each other who actually like and admire ~90% of the other, but just can’t reconcile the other 10%. The Barbers have different goals and agendas, but no real animus towards each other. However, the only system available to them for moving forward is one designed along ruthless, winner-take-all grounds. This leads to much conflict and soul-searching. Eventually, through introspection and growth, they manage to achieve something approaching a conscious uncoupling without scarring Henry too much in the process.

So which SHOULD win?

There were a lot of very good, enjoyable films in the class, but only 3 that really made you think about film as an art form and its capabilities: “1917,” “Jojo Rabbit,” and “Parasite.” Of these three Jojo Rabbit was both the most thought-provoking and the most straight-up enjoyable. My pick for the best movie of 2019 is: Jojo Rabbit.

But which WILL win?

“1917” appears to be the favorite, with “Parasite” a potential dark horse. I’m going with “1917,” and I can’t quibble too much; it’s a really good film.

And in the other categories ...

Best Actress: Renee Zellweger looks like a lock for her role in “Judy.”

Best Supporting Actress: Laura Dern should win here, not for being the mother of the Little Women, but for being the glamorous, “take no prisoners” Hollywood divorce lawyer in “Marriage Story.”

Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix should follow in Heath Ledger’s footsteps by winning an Oscar portraying the Joker. While I am loathe to see this depressing trainwreck of a film garner any accolades, I must grudgingly admit that Phoenix gives a powerful performance. Still not worth seeing the film, however.

Best Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt should run away with this category. His performance definitely IS worth seeing “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.”

Best Director: Again this is a race between Sam Mendes for “1917” and Bong Joon Ho for “Parasite.” And again “1917” is the clear favorite and “Parasite” is the dark horse. The Academy has taken to splitting Best Picture and Best Director of late, but I’m going to play it safe and choose Mendes.

Best International Feature Film: “Parasite” should earn its richly-deserved Oscar here. As well as ...

Best Original Screenplay: Look for “Parasite” here. It is definitely very original.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Jojo Rabbit. I would have loved to see Waititi nominated - and even win - for directing, but he will have to settle for winning for his writing. Something tells me he’ll be fine.

Best Cinematography: 1917

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Bombshell

That’s it for this year. Until next year, save me an aisle seat

[rivahadi]

The Hate U Give, A Teen’s Political Awakening while in search for her Identity

The Hate U Give (2018) is an incredibly powerful contemporary epic that offers a diverse view of what it’s like to grow up black in America. It also connects to the themes of family, identity, race and justice. The use of these themes result in a narrative where the main character is brave enough to stand up to an unjust system and explore her own identity. Starr, the main character of the movie, is a young black student who is effectively living a double life. Her dad is a proud Black Panther who lives in a tough black neighbourhood, but he has now settled down to running a store profitable enough for him to send his daughter to a posh private school. It is here that Starr has learned how to pass for white culturally: nice, hardworking Starr hangs out with the Insta princesses who appear to accept her with no reservations and she has a really nice white boyfriend. Although in school she is always careful to keep any threateningly “black” mannerisms in check, when she goes to parties in her own neighbourhood, she has to avoid any “white” phrases.

Insta princesses … Megan Lawless, Amandla Stenberg and Sabrina Carpenter in The Hate U Give. Photograph: Erika Doss/AP To visually mirror the experience of switching between the worlds of Garden Heights, her home where her own family grew up and Williamson Prep, the affluent white private high school, the lighting and color of the scenes also change from warm, familiar tones (Garden Heights) to washed out blue hues (Williamson). The scenes in the Carter household look inviting and well lit, bringing to mind the comfort of a loving family. When Starr is at school, her face looks washed out and pale, as if the screen was trying to mute the colors of everyone’s skin to look the same. She tries so desperately to fit in this environment, she sacrifices who she is in more ways than just avoiding using the slang terms. The issue of racial tension—and how to deal with it— extends throughout the film. Starr and some of her white friends struggle with racism, though only Starr seems to recognize it and makes efforts to move past it. She's also willing to confront others at times regarding these issues. At one point, some white kids go around spewing crude slang. An angry Starr puts some of them in their place, stating, "You all want to act black, but keep your white privilege." It is at one of the parties in her neighbourhood that she runs into Khalil, a boy she once knew when they were both kids. Khalil disappeared for a while and ended up selling drugs for the local gang, the King Lords, in order to take care of his cancer-ridden grandmother. When a fight breaks out at the party, Khalil offers to take Starr home to make sure she gets there safely. A cop pulls them over for some unexplained reason, and Khalil gets defensive. Starr tries to coach him through her father’s warnings: hands on the dashboard, do what they say. Khalil is shot and killed by a white police officer after reaching into his car and pulling out a hairbrush. The officer then handcuffs Starr next to her dying friend. He had mistaken the hairbrush in Khalil’s hand as a weapon and shot first before asking any questions. Starr finds that she has to testify under oath in front of a grand jury, meaning that she, Khalil and her whole community will be on trial. The crisis of loyalty means her whole “white/black” identity goes to pieces, along with friendships with people who “don’t see race”. The issues confronting black Americans today are reflected in the wide-ranging ensemble, as Starr is conflicted about what to do. It challenges clichéd ideas like “not seeing color,” as Starr emotionally confronts her boyfriend by saying, “If you don’t see color, you don’t see me.” As Starr works to find her own identity, we’re exposed to a variety of diverse identities along the way. No two black experiences are the same, but the refusal to recognize the validity of any black experiences is part of the reason the racial divide in the United States of America remains so intense. Both of Starr's parents take every opportunity to protect their kids. Mav, her father, comforts his emotionally wounded daughter after Khalil's death. Mav also physically places himself between his family and drug dealing thugs as well as two cops with guns drawn. Starr's mom is willing to do the same. It's obvious that the whole family has a close, loving bond. The movie feels instructional without getting too preachy, taking time to explain various inequalities that black Americans face, typically in exchanges between father and daughter. In learning the ways of this unjust system, Starr decides not to accept things the way they are. Her outlook reflects the kind of youth-led movements that have sprung up from Black Lives Matter and the marches against gun violence in schools. An activist declares that police shootings of blacks are all equally unjustified. "It's impossible to be unarmed," Starr proclaims, "When our blackness is the weapon they fear!" The film repeatedly shows one protestor cry that, "The whole darn system is corrupt!" Starr gets angry when a friend says, "Cops' lives matter, too." For all the declarations we hear about innocent until proven guilty, the film questions why people of color so often seem guilty until proven innocent.   Amandla Stenberg in the film adaptation of Angie Thomas’s best-selling book, “The Hate U Give.”Credit Erika Doss/Twentieth Century Fox

Even though this film attempts to be fair-minded, it still comes off feeling one-sided in its treatment of controversial issues. Viewers who agree with its perspective may cheer its messages. Those who don't may very well be offended by them. And for many, the film's foul language and violence will only add to that discomfort. For the other side, swearing could be seen as something powerful. When chosen with deliberate consideration, they aren't a cop-out; they're a strong way to make a statement with a particular audience. Together with the emphasis on speaking truth to power, language thus becomes the ultimate means to spur meaningful societal change. The title The Hate U Give is derived from a Tupac Shakur interview, and if you hadn’t already guessed, an acronym for THUG. But in Tupac’s original words, the full acronym was for THUG LIFE: The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody, which is repeated throughout the film. As he said in the original interview, “What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face.” And if the seeds that are being sewn within Generation-Z are that we live in a society that stands up, like Starr, and become the voice for the voiceless, then maybe in the future we’ll have fewer needs for films like this.,but until we do, films like The Hate U Give are important. These stories haven’t been given the platform like this to be told, and they desperately need to continue to be told; very well could save lives. This movie ultimately presents blackness itself as a multifaceted identity, complicating the stereotypical assumptions thrust upon Starr, her family, and Garden Heights at large. Families who watch this will have plenty of big issues to discuss afterward; hopefully teens will also appreciate the movie's messages about standing up for what they believe in, being proud of who you are, and communicating honestly with their parents and friends.The Hate U Give forces viewers to recognize the characters as fully human and to reckon with them on their terms. With heroines like Starr at the fore, viewers can imagine not only new possibilities for black girls, but also new visions of our collective humanity.  Rising out of a space of being policed at home, at school, and on the streets, Starr carves out an identity of her own where she is no longer confined to the prison of silence and complacency. In fact, she’s found a sense of freedom in being a voice for a young black generation — even for those that are long gone.

Dear Dr. Shea, Writing a Pop culture analysis paper is something I’ve never done before, but it’s something I found myself quite passionate writing about. I really like the fact that you gave us the freedom to pick and analyze a pop culture artifact of our choice, as it gave me the opportunity to write about something I truly care about. The activities we did in class really prepared me to write this paper and make it something I was proud of. Connecting the movie I critiqued to our class themes helped me understand and see the movie from a range of perspectives. It also pushed me to educate myself more about the issues that are portrayed in this film. I included film analysis terms because ever since we did the film analysis paper last semester, I often notice the lighting, music and camera angles when watching a movie. Noticing these things has pushed me to think deeper about the meaning of what’s being portrayed on screen. I think the strongest part of my paper is the way I played with grammar and how I connected this movie to our class themes, as well as issues around the world. A weaker aspect of my paper is my conclusion. I’m not quite sure if it’s enough but I did think about it, and it did evolve into something better in my final draft. I found the writing process enjoyable as I loved this movie and even went back to watch it for a second time half way through writing my paper. I hope you enjoy reading my pop analysis paper on The Hate U Give. Sincerely, Riva

[mastcomm]

Romances That Let Black Women Be Ambitious for a Change

My partner, Solomon, and I still argue about Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2000 romance, “Love & Basketball.” The movie tells the story of Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps), which begins with Monica’s family moving in next door to Quincy’s when they are both 11, follows them as their friendship turns to courtship right before they graduate high school and start playing basketball at U.S.C. Once in college, they juggle off-court drama (Quincy learns that his pro-athlete father has impregnated a woman outside his marriage), and on-court demands (Monica fights to earn her spot as the starting point guard).

These pressures come to a head when Quincy asks Monica to stay up late to help him process his parents’ marital crisis, and Monica, worried about her place on the team, returns to her dorm to make curfew. Dejected, Quincy ultimately decides to leave Monica and college and go pro. Monica, meanwhile, ends up playing basketball in Spain. Years later, they meet again in Los Angeles, and after she loses a pickup game to him, she wins his heart and a starting spot on the Sparks.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as black directors turned to black romances in “Love Jones,” “The Best Man,” “Brown Sugar” and other films, “Love & Basketball” stood out even more for featuring black characters whose ambition (Monica) and craving for domestic bliss (Quincy) challenged traditional gender norms. At the heart of the disagreement between Monica and Quincy — and for that matter, Solomon and me — was our generation’s gender wars gone buppie: Could Monica really win the boy next door, play ball and have it all?

A new crop of heterosexual black love stories — including “The Photograph,” “Premature” and the series “Cherish the Day” — by black filmmakers answers that question with a definitive yes. Though they pay homage to Prince-Bythewood’s vision with African-American female leads as complex, cosmopolitan and curious as Monica, the central conflict of these new stories is whether their characters can work through personal trauma, break free of the “strong black woman” stereotype, and be vulnerable enough to love themselves and their partners. In line with a larger recognition of black women’s multidimensionality in American culture and politics, never once do their male partners make them feel bad for dreaming big: their ambition is their appeal.

Released on Valentine’s Day, “The Photograph,” written and directed by Stella Meghie, involves a pair of love stories told across two generations. In the contemporary one, a New York museum curator named Mae (Issa Rae) meets Michael (Lakeith Stanfield), a journalist who is writing a profile of Christina, a photographer and Mae’s late mother. In 2020, Mae’s flourishing career is a given. In the 1990s-set flashback, Christina leaves her boyfriend, Isaac, to pursue her artistic passion in New York City.

“I think the benefit of having the two characters Christina and Mae is that you can show them going through different things,” Meghie said in an interview. “For Christina, her driving force is figuring out how she was going to be successful careerwise. For Mae, her mom’s success and her dad help her to achieve that. Now, she needs to look at what is missing in her life and what issues that she’s not confronting emotionally within herself. Hers is a more philosophical journey.”

Growing up, Meghie was obsessed with films like “Love Jones” (like Christina, the main character in that 1997 drama was a photographer) and “Love & Basketball.” Later, those films became blueprints for her own screenwriting. “I grew up playing basketball so Monica was a character that I very much saw myself in as an athlete and tomboy who really didn’t know how to date or how to have a boyfriend or how to tell a guy you like them,” Meghie reflected. “And that last scene when she’s like, ‘I’ll play you for your heart.’ It makes me cry still because it is a moment where you realize you can’t just be this strong girl. He’s going to walk away if you don’t show him that you love him.”

In “Premature” (due Feb. 21), the question of whether Ayanna, a 17-year-old Harlem poet, will throw away her ambition for love propels much of the romantic drama. It’s the summer before she’s due to attend college, and her music-producer lover (Joshua Boone) does not want her to sacrifice her education to be with him.

Directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green, who co-wrote it with his star, Zora Howard, the film is the result of what the two saw as a lack of black love stories today, especially those that center on the experiences of young black women.

“One of the things that really drove us to write this story was the very simple fact that we grew up watching love stories in the 1990s with people of color, black people and brown people, in them,” Green said. “In the current landscape, because of what has transpired in this country politically, there has been an overabundance of films that deal with black trauma, victimization, pain and suffering. We wanted to offer a film that dealt with the other side of that narrative, present a story that we felt was universal, and invite people into our lives and our love in a way that we hope is also effective.”

Fortunately, this trend is not just limited to the big screen. Each episode of Ava DuVernay’s latest series, “Cherish the Day” (which premiered Feb. 11 on OWN), follows a single day of a young couple’s romance over five years. Revolving around the relationship between Evan (Alano Miller), a Stanford-educated, Tesla-driving tech engineer, and Gently (Xosha Roquemore), a bohemian, globe-trotting caregiver from South Los Angeles, it appears at first to be a story about opposites attracting.

But, as the show’s format intentionally accelerates the timeline, we quickly learn that Gently’s carefreeness is not a drawback to Evan but rather an inspiration for his entrepreneurship and an indicator of her hard-earned freedom in life and love. In turn, Gently is now front and center, unlike past characters whose whimsical natures would have them sidelined as comic relief (think Freddie from “A Different World” or Lynn from “Girlfriends”).

Evan “fits into what we usually see in our iterations of black love,” Roquemore said. “He’s fiscally successful and highly educated — those stories in which black people have to be perfect.”

Unlike Evan, whose parents have been married for 40 years, Gently is raised by a family friend who takes her in after her father’s gang-related death and her substance-abusing mother abandons her. “Instead of Gently being hardened by her background, it makes her more eclectic or freer or makes her want to travel the world,” Roquemore said. “She’s trying to channel that pain into something else, which I think is just a little more realistic.”

Noting that few Hollywood writers depict black women as both vulnerable and aspirational, Roquemore touched on how clichéd so many stories are still: “Because I live my life as a black woman that is multifaceted, Gently is so very familiar to me. When people are like, ‘Whoa, what is this? I’ve never met anyone like this!’ No, they’ve just never seen it on TV.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/entertainment/romances-that-let-black-women-be-ambitious-for-a-change/

[thelonguepuree]

Feminism never succeeded in securing women as a collective subject of history, as the Marxist intellectual tradition once hoped to do with the working class. On the contrary, contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category, on the grounds that this category has historically functioned as a cruel ruse for white supremacy, the gender binary, the economic interests of the American ruling class, and possibly patriarchy itself. This has put feminism in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshipping her somewhat up in the air. Perhaps the simplest solution to this paradox has been to quietly shift the meaning of the word feminism. In popular culture and especially online, feminism has become the go-to signifier for what the legal scholar Janet Halley calls convergentism: the belief that justice projects with different constituencies have a moral duty to converge, like lines stretching toward a vanishing point. Once the name of a single plank in a hypothetical program of universal justice, feminism now refers, increasingly, to the whole platform — hence the so-called Unity Principles put forward on the Women’s March website, which include calls for migrant rights, a living wage, and clean air as well as the familiar demands for reproductive freedom and an end to sexual violence. “It ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional,” tweeted Ariana Grande in March 2019, echoing a viral 2011 blog post by the writer Flavia Dzodan. Dzodan’s original phrasing was “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”; popular variations now include the formula “If your feminism doesn’t include x, then it’s not feminism,” where x might be trans women, women of color, fat women, sex workers, nonbinary people, or any number of other groups. The idea is not that feminists, being desirous of justice, should also commit to antiracism, anti-imperialism, and all the rest; it’s that feminism by definition consists in the making of extrafeminist commitments, such that without them, it would not be feminism at all. This is weird. It is as if, having guiltily assimilated the impossibility of speaking on behalf of all women, feminism has resigned itself to the modest virtues of playing hostess for other, frankly more persuasive political discourses — most of whose constituencies are composed of women, of course, but never simply as women. In this arrangement, feminism describes not a concrete political project but the moral imperative to do politics in the first place. In other words, a feminist is a good person. If that sounds clichéd, that’s kind of the point. The conviction that it is both possible and desirable to be a feminist, in an ontologically thick way, has no parallel in any other left political discourse, and a wide array of digital media has arisen to guide and instruct initiates: just as Better Homes & Gardens once taught its readership how to cook and decorate like good women, so do Teen Vogue and The Cut offer tips on how to be a good feminist while getting dressed in the morning. The irony is that feminism, having some fifty years ago introduced the radical idea that the personal was political, has today ended up with the laborious task of making politics feel personal. Hence the possessive pronoun — my feminism, your feminism. It’s easy, and foolish, to dismiss this as neoliberalism or corporate co-optation. Digital slogans like Dzodan’s, regardless of their original intention, find popularity not because they are true (even when they are), but because their repetition across social media helps people achieve feelings of belonging, purpose, and importance that allow them to bridge the yawning gap between their individual everyday lives and the grand narrative of political universality. This is, as it were, the women’s work of the political imagination; it is thankless, sentimental, and impossible to do without. I suppose what I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all. In a punishing twist, feminism has become both the preferred name for this desire and the very politics which must not claim it. Indeed, the minimal definition of a feminist might be a person who, affirming that women will never constitute a political class, privately hopes it might happen anyway. Can you really blame the Women’s March for wanting a symbol for universal womanhood, if symbols are all we ever have? In anticipation of the march, the Twitter account for the Washington Post’s free daily newspaper, the Express, tweeted an illustration of a crowd in the shape of a circle with an arrow on one side. This was the wrong gender symbol — an eminently avoidable gaffe whose ridiculousness multiplied in proportion to the number of editors over whose desks one imagines it must have passed. But the error was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. This may have been thanks to the illustration’s color, a radiant peach pink, or to the fact that it wasn’t even a conventional Mars symbol, the arrow boasting a full triangle reminiscent of the Clinton campaign’s rightward barb. But the mistake may have also owed its endurance to an unconscious editorial assumption that desperation for a political symbol — any symbol — was a condition so persuasively female as to render the specifics of that symbol irrelevant.

from Andrea Long Chu, “The Pink” n+1 (x)

[newyorktheater]

Just a couple of plays are opening on Broadway this month — “Choir Boy,” and “True West” — and a handful Off-Broadway, but January is one of the most robust months for theater in New York, thanks in large measure to the January theater festivals.

Together these festivals offer more than 100 shows; most are experimental, often hybrids that redefine what theater is, and are difficult to describe; many run for only one or two performances Below is a selective list of Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway and festival offerings in January, organized chronologically by opening date (or, for a festival show and some Off-Off Broadway, the first performance), with each title linked to a relevant website. Color key: Broadway: Red. Off Broadway: Black or Blue.. Off Off Broadway: Green. January theater festival: Orange. Immersive: Magenta Below that, links to the home pages of five of the festivals. (I’ve created the immersive category more as incentive for the adventurous rather than a warning, although such a show often means lots of standing, and some unusual interaction that some might find uncomfortable.)

January 2

Baba Brinkman’s Rap Guide to Consciousness (Soho Playhouse)

This latest piece by “Peer reviewed rapper” illuminates the neuroscience of human experience, from sensations to hallucinations. I’ve seen his rap guides to religion and to climate chaos; they were packed with information.

January 3

HEAR WORD! Naija Woman Talk True (Under the Radar) The show celebrates women who have broken the culture of silence, challenged the status quo, and moved beyond barriers to achieve solutions.

Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein (Under the Radar) The gothic classic, combine with a biography of its author Mary Shelley, told through the company’s signature handmade shadow puppetry, and makeshift cinematic techniques

Nature and Purpose (Soho Playhouse)

Two shows focusing on the abstract expressionist ​Jackson Pollock and the controversial performance artist ​Chris Burden​.

January 4

Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury’s As Far As My Fingers Take Me (Under the Radar) immersive

An encounter through a gallery wall between a refugee and one audience member at a time. The refugee will mark the audience member’s arm by drawing on it.

[50/50] old school animation (Under the Radar)

A ghost story that “flirts with the horrific and dips into the surreal. “

The Cold Record (Under the Radar) immersive A one-man show from the Rude Mechs. “The story of a 12-year old boy who tries to set the record for leaving school the most days with a fever and in the process falls in love with the school nurse and breaks his heart on the punk rock.”

Minor Character (Under the Radar) This kaleidoscopic adaptation of Uncle Vanya collages a century’s worth of English translations into one sprawling, intimate, quietly disastrous evening.

Dueted: What Holds Head (Exponential Festival) immersive  A site-specific, interactive performance on intimacy, fidelity, and desire, comprised of a sequence of one-on-one experiences between a single attendee and a performer.

January 5

Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance (Prototype)

A bilingual cross-border multimedia opera about the enigmatic general, legendary bandit, and hero of the Mexican Revolution. Created by Austin, TX based composer Graham Reynolds, librettists Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol of Mexico City, director Shawn Sides of Rude Mech, two vocalists and six instrumentalists.

4.48 Psychosis (Prototype)

Philip Venable’s operatic adaptation of Sarah Kane’s final play, with 28 fragmented episodes to reveal an individual’s struggle to come to terms with their own psychosis. A production from the Royal Opera.

Real (The Tank)  This play by Brazilian playwright Rodrigo Nogueira, tells two stories that eventually intertwine of two people living in New York 85 years apart — a working mother in 2019 who takes up an instrument she used to play and reassesses her life, and a gay immigrant composer in 1934 who in the process of writing a fugue starts to feel he’s meant to live somebody else’s life.

Ink (Under the Radar)

A mash-up of an art history lecture, personal essay, and electronic music concert, this piece is a love letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is performed

January 6

prism (Prototype)

Opera-Theater composed by Ellen Reid about a traumatized mother and daughter who attempt to escape the past by retreating into a single room.

January 7

Blue Ridge (Atlantic) In this play by Abby Rosebrock set in Southern Appalachia, Marin Ireland portrays a progressive high-school teacher with a rage problem retaliates against her unscrupulous boss and is sentenced to six months at a church-sponsored halfway house, where she attends to everyone’s recovery but her own.

January 8

Choir Boy (MTC’s Samuel Friedman)  Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney (best known for the Oscar-winning movie “Moonlight”) and transferring from MTC’s Off-Broadway theater: For half a century, the Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys has been dedicated to the education of strong, ethical black men. Jeremy Pope reprises the role he had in the Off-Broadway production as a gay youth whose appointment as head of the school’s legendary gospel choir sparks tension.

January 9

This Bridge Called My Ass (American Realness)

Six Latinx performers – Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Miguel Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez – map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sound….Clichéd Latin-American songs and the form of the telenovela are exploited to show how familiar structures contain absurdity that reveal and celebrate difference.

Evolution of a Sonero (Under the Radar)

The first full-length show by poet, singer, and actor Flaco Navaja, original member of the Universes and Def Poetry Jam cast

January 10

Chambre Noire (Under the Radar)

Life-sized puppets, broken songs and video-projections come together to illuminate the hallucinatory final moments of Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol

Wendell & Pan (The Tank)  A play by Katelynn Kenney. Life’s hard when you’re 11, your only friend is the ghost of your 12-year-old dead aunt, your sister wishes she could be on the other side of her cellphone, your parents make every room frigid, and your sick grandpa wants you to kill him.

January 11

Minefield (Under The Radar) Combining theater and film, Lola Arias brings together British and Argentinian veterans of the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas war to share their first-hand experience of the conflict and life since.

January 15

Mortality Machine (Sinking Ship Creations at Wildrence) immersive This live-action roleplay makes each theatergoer the protagonist of the story, assigned an identity as a surviving family member of one of the five people who died in an illegal medical experiment five years earlier. The survivors have now gained access to the laboratory, and through interaction with “peculiar individuals who’ll help you tell your tale using dance and movement.

January 17

Behind the Sheet (EST)

Playwright Charly Evon Simpson confronts the history of a great medical breakthrough by telling the forgotten story of a community of enslaved black women who involuntarily enabled the discovery. In 1840s Alabama, Philomena assists a doctor – her owner – as he performs experimental surgeries on her fellow slave women, trying to find a treatment for the painful post-childbirth complications known as fistulas.

January 23

A Man for All Seasons (FPA at Theater Row)

A revival of the 1961 play by Robert Bolt: “As Sir Thomas More refuses to recognize Henry VIII’s divorce and ascendancy as Supreme Head of the new Church of England, A Man for All Seasons reveals the risk of speaking truth to power and the clash that follows when fierce political will collides with deep moral conviction.”

January 24

True West (Roundabout’s American Airlines) Ethan Hawke stars opposite Paul Dano in a revival of Sam Shepard’s play about the clash between two brothers.

10th Annual 10-Minute Play Program (The Fire This Time)

January 28

Banigold II (Exponential)

“This hybrid puppet-video performance lazily examines stoic philosophy and is live scored by Lucy Hollier & co. with original animations from Unimercial Studios.” One of five short works presented together as part of Exponential Variety 2 at The Glove experimental art space in Bushwick.

January 29

God Said This (Primary Stages at Cherry Lane) An award-winning play by Leah Nanako Winkler about five Kentuckians facing mortality in very different ways. “With her mom undergoing chemotherapy, Hiro, a NYC transplant, returns home to Kentucky after years away, struggling to let go of the demons she inherited.”

January Theater Festivals

For a complete list of Theater Festival offerings, check them out individually

Under the Radar January 3 – 13

The Public Theater’s festival is the oldest (at 15) and largest, and tilts towards international productions.

American Realness January 4 – 13 “Fifty-nine performances of sixteen performance works from seventeen artists over ten days at twelve venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx.“ It’s primarily dance.

Exponential Festival January 4 – February 3

Spread out over nine venues in Brooklyn, the festival is “dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance.”

Prototype January 5 – 13

In its seventh season, it is presenting 12 works of opera-theater

The Fire This Time Festival January 21 – February 2

The festival marks its tenth year of providing “rising playwrights of African and African American descent a platform to write and develop new work.”

January 2019 New York Theater Openings: 2 on Broadway, 100 in January Theater Festivals Just a couple of plays are opening on Broadway this month -- "Choir Boy," and "True West" -- and a handful Off-Broadway, but January is one of the most robust months for theater in New York, thanks in large measure to the January theater festivals.

[mrcoreymonroe]

Veteran Pilot Identifies Similarities In Younger Pilot

At the Barnstormer’s Grill in Williamson, Georgia, I sat in a booth next to myself at age 20. Okay, so he was redheaded and thin, but the parts that really mattered were all but identical. Similar socioeconomic upbringing, same struggle to continue higher education, same desire to fly airplanes for a living.

And friends, this young man could fly the stuffing out of an airplane.

Our paths crossed by way of mutual friend Kelly Leggette. Kelly, my friend, mentor and the benefactor who wrote a blank check noted “pay me back when you can” so I could finish the ratings to become a professional pilot back when I often searched my Toyota’s cupholder for gas money. Kelly owns two of the Zlin 526s that were part of the airshow team I grew up helping with, and every once in a while, we get together for a day of flying. Kelly’s a retired Air Force pilot who’ll leap at any chance for some formation work in the Zlins. For the better part of two decades, he’s kept me on his insurance for just this reason.

“Hope you don’t mind that I invited Nathan to come along today,” Kelly said.

I’d have been disappointed had he not.

As we had prepped for our $100 hamburger sortie, I strapped into the two-seat Zlin for a quick hop around the patch to polish a little on my tarnished tailwheel skills. This is the airplane my airshow team’s leader, Chris Smisson, had opened numerous airshows with, a red, white and blue airplane trailing matching colored smoke, flying to patriotic tunes, and taxiing in under a ruffling American flag; a somewhat conflicted performance given the airplane began life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The staccato snarl of its inverted-inline six-cylinder mill starting up puts a little tear in my eye every time I release the starter button. If anyone asks, I’ll swear up and down it’s the smoke, not the nostalgia. Once the engine temperatures came up, I pushed the canopy closed, drove the throttle forward, and clawed into the air for a couple circuits to make myself legal. Sometimes years fill the gaps between our dances together, but she’s always a familiar partner as soon as the music starts playing. With three patterns and about five landings under my belt, I joined Kelly and Nathan in the workshop where Kelly briefed up our flight. I’d be leading the formation, and he ran through all the procedures and techniques that once were second nature. We hashed out how the Atlanta Class B airspace had changed since I used to romp around beneath it, figured out our route of flight, brushed up on emergency procedures, frequencies and our plan for the traffic pattern once we got to Williamson.

“Let Nathan fly a little,” Kelly said. “Just point to the back of his head so I know I’m on his wing, and I’ll fan out a few feet.”

We fired up, taxied out, took off with a few seconds’ in-trail spacing, and formed up over the tree farm that’d been the setting for so many shenanigans back when we had an aerobatic box here. Nathan, in the front pit, armed with an iPad, called out a heading for me. I pointed our nose in the general direction, and he kept feeding me with corrections. “Hey, you’ve got a stick up there. You know where you’re going. Hold this altitude (the front altimeter is in meters) and take us there. You’ve got the controls,” I said with a small wiggle on the stick.

He locked onto the heading, held the altitude and beelined for our first checkpoint. With my copper-headed autopilot on the task, I put my feet on the floor, looked a few yards across to Kelly, and dramatically pointed at the back of Nathan’s head. Then I tucked both hands behind my head, and gazed around for traffic, slowly baking in a Plexiglas greenhouse beneath the hot August sun and making a big show of looking like I wasn’t doing a thing.

Then it dawned on me. I was exactly where some of my mentors had been, watching me grow as an aviator 20 years prior. “You’re doing great,” I offered, remembering the effusing praises heaped on my developing skills that’d helped bolster confidence in the young me. The kind words given me in spite of knowing that, back then, I was way out of my league, breathing rich air while living on lean-of-peak finances.

My sentimental reverie was interrupted when Nathan announced, “Hey, there’s the airport.” I had him lay off to the right, setting us up for an overhead pattern, and I took the controls as I waved Kelly to tuck it in tight for the break. I pitched out to downwind, then repeated the words Smisson had whispered into the intercom for me all those years ago, two-thirds ground, one-third sky, keep the turn coming as I banked around to final. With several kilometers of speed to spare, I wheeled it on and rolled long up the hill with some added power, giving plenty of margin for Kelly, who was floating down final behind us. He was invisible in my blind spot but clear in his position since we’d briefed it up. One man’s runway incursion is another’s formation arrival.

As we walked to the grill, I turned and shook Nathan’s hand, another habit I learned at his age. A handshake and the words “you’ve got good hands” were the crowning compliment of my early days as a pilot, and being on the giving end of a similar exchange was an out-of-body experience.

Seated around the table, Kelly and I shared a few stories from our day jobs flying heavy metal, and I floated a couple ideas for Nathan as he’s on the brink of his private check ride with concerns of cash flow, continuing college and chasing the dream of flight. The bar is even higher for him than it’d been for me: New hires in my regional airline class had sported fresh commercial tickets with less than 300 hours’ experience; now he’s tasked with reaching ATP minimums to do the same job. The flight school where he pumps gas presently seems to be welcoming him with open arms and hopefully will fast-track him to CFI status so he can build some time. Not having instructed was one of my biggest challenges in transitioning to the multi-crew environment: I’d sung songs and talked to the airplanes I’d flown but had rarely had to communicate to keep anyone else in the plane on the same page, operationally. Having to spend a year or so instructing will be great in helping him avoid the stumbles I encountered.

As we dragged our fries through the ketchup while plotting and scheming, it dawned on me: This was as close to writing a letter to my younger self—that trite and clichéd creative writing prompt—that I’d ever encounter. Don’t get preachy, I reminded myself.

For the flight back, I swapped to the single-seat bird, a Zlin 526 AFS. Clipped wings, dual ailerons on each wing, and a few refinements make this bird even more of a hoot to fly. We’d wanted to work in some formation practice on the flight back, some pitch-outs and rejoins for me to continue with the refresher, but the single seat’s fuel capacity is measured in drips, not gallons. Halfway home, Kelly called for a fuel check. I slid out a few extra yards and glanced to the fuel gauges in the wing roots. There was a lot more black than red showing. “Lead is showing 50 liters,” he said. “Two has 30,” I replied. “Let’s head home for some go-juice.” The Czechs built magnificent flying machines, but they designed them so that defecting was mighty difficult. I had about 15 minutes remaining on top of the VFR reserve fuel requirements and home was just about that far away. We landed and fueled up. I’d have to fire up to taxi back to its stable anyhow, so I went around the patch right quick for one last dance, quick and dirty. A quick run west got me out from beneath Atlanta’s airspace restrictions, and I held the stick against the left aileron’s stop for a quick roll, my phone’s camera button held for a burst of selfies, reminders that this stuff is fun, for the next rough day at the office.

On my return, I misjudged the flare, flew the mains right into the grass and ricocheted for two more bounces before a properly timed burst of power set her down to stay. As Nathan walked over to help me push her under cover, he smiled a knowing smile, having watched the big show, and offered these few words. “Most of those three landings weren’t half bad.” I chuckled at the good-natured brotherly ribbing.

Stay with it, kid. Don’t give up.

I mean every word of it.

Sincerely,

Me

The post Veteran Pilot Identifies Similarities In Younger Pilot appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

from Plane & Pilot Magazine https://ift.tt/2V47GmK

[theconservativebrief]

David Lowery’s newest film, The Old Man & the Gun, is a return to familiar material for the filmmaker. Almost a decade ago, his second feature film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, became a breakout critical hit at the Sundance Film Festival. A tale of romance and heartbreak between a couple (played by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck) who seem modeled on iconic outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, the movie launched Lowery’s career.

It’s fitting that Sundance is where Lowery broke out, because that festival was founded by Robert Redford and named for the outlaw he played in his own 1969 breakout role, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And when Redford got interested in another outlaw — Forrest Tucker, the subject of a 2003 New Yorker article entitled “The Old Man and the Gun” — he decided to make a movie about Tucker and approached Lowery to direct the project.

Redford, now 82, also decided to make the film his farewell to the big screen, and it’s a fitting bookend to his on-screen career. Lowery took on writing and directing The Old Man & the Gun, which co-stars Sissy Spacek and Casey Affleck and comes out on September 28. With his poetic cinematic sensibility and proclivity for wistfully romantic stories, The Old Man & the Gun is a good fit for Lowery — and a terrific tribute to both Redford’s career and the American bank robber archetype.

Lowery and I spoke by phone about the surprising films he used as touch points when making this movie, how you write for a bona fide screen legend, and his mixed feelings about the criminal characters he’s written for his movies.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alissa Wilkinson

So why are you so attracted to stories about thieves?

David Lowery

The clichéd response to that is that I love the idea of “getting away with it,” whether it’s in heist films or in my own life as a filmmaker who feels like he consistently has to get away with it.

But the more I use that answer, the more I wonder how much I actually agree with it. There’s something incredibly inappropriate with getting away with it, so I’m also like, “What am I saying whenever I say this?”

So it’s given me a lot of moral pause, so to speak, as I’ve trotted out my more rambunctious and fun-loving answer.

Writer and director David Lowery in 2017. Francois Durand/Getty Images

Alissa Wilkinson

The films you’ve made about thieves seem to actually question whether the way we think about them — as being glamorous people who get away with things — is altogether good.

David Lowery

I don’t necessarily agree with the perspective that the characters in my films have! I don’t think that ultimately it is sustainable, or that they can get away with it. What that says about me whenever I transpose my own life choices onto these characters starts to seem somewhat grim. [Laughs]

Alissa Wilkinson

So what got you interested in this project, then?

David Lowery

I really wanted to make a quintessential Robert Redford movie. That’s what this was always going to be, because this was a project that he brought to me. It was an article that he had optioned, a character he wanted to play. And he had seen Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and liked the idea of me taking a crack at it.

So his producing partner called me and asked me if I would sit down with them to talk about it. And of course, I said yes.

I read the article with him in mind. I saw Forrest Tucker as Robert Redford from day one.

So the goal from that first meeting was to craft a role that he could really sink his teeth into, but that would also honor the legacy of what he has done across many decades as one of the most iconic movie stars of all time.

Alissa Wilkinson

What do you think attracted Redford to the story in the first place?

David Lowery

I think he really saw an opportunity to have fun onscreen. He had spent many years making very serious films that had a lot of political weight or dramatic weight to them. And he really wanted to have fun.

He also wanted to play a character that was a spiritual successor to some of the characters he’d played before. He definitely saw the lineage between the Sundance Kid and Forrest Tucker, or what he’d done in The Sting and Forrest Tucker. I think that appealed to him as well.

He definitely does not think about this movie as “a Robert Redford movie.” He thinks about it as the story of Forrest Tucker. And that’s his right to think that way!

But for me as a filmmaker, and for us as audience members, it’s impossible for us to separate who he is from the character he’s playing onscreen.

Lowery with his cast at The Old Man & the Gun’s premiere in September. Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

Alissa Wilkinson

Did you find that challenging, as a director?

David Lowery

I found it more challenging as a writer! It was really tough to write the script. I first met with him five years ago. So the screenplay was in the works for a good solid four years before we started shooting it. Of course, in that time period I made two other movies, and I changed as a filmmaker as well.

It was really hard to figure out how to utilize who he is. For better or worse, he can never truly disappear into a character, because he has just been a movie star for so long. That’s my perspective as an audience member. I’m always somewhat tacitly aware that I’m watching Robert Redford play a character, and I enjoy that. I think that’s part of the appeal of who he is.

But it makes writing a part for him a little bit more challenging. You really have to tap into what makes him who he is in order to give him something that he can do his best with.

It wasn’t until we worked on Pete’s Dragon together [in which he played a minor role] that I really felt I was able to write the part for him specifically. So it was a great luxury to have the opportunity to work with him once in a smaller capacity before diving into this one.

Alissa Wilkinson

What makes Redford the icon that he is?

David Lowery

I think it’s a combination of things. His looks — he is incredibly handsome. He’s got a marquee quality to his appearance that instantly makes you think, Oh, this guy should be seen, whether in photographs or in film. You can always feel the wheels turning behind his eyes. He’s got that very particular squint that makes you think he’s always second-guessing the situation he is in, or criticizing it, or just trying to figure out exactly what’s really going on.

There’s this sort of wily intelligence that is always there behind every performance that he gives that makes you feel like there’s more to him than just his good looks.

And his countercultural attitude, I think, plays a huge part in his appeal. He has always put himself in the place of being a cultural outlaw. He’s always tried to step a little bit outside the beaten path in the work he does as a filmmaker. Politically, as an environmentalist, he’s always standing up for the people who don’t have a voice, and he’s always championing causes that need to be championed. He’s always standing up to institutions. Something about that comes through in his performances. Over the years, it has become such a part of who he is: that outlaw mentality, that anti-institutionalism mentality.

Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford star together in The Old Man & the Gun. Fox Searchlight

Alissa Wilkinson

Obviously that’s tied to the idea of these famous, iconic bank robbers and outlaws. As you’re writing this film for an icon, were you thinking about the icon of the bank robber as well, a character that’s been all over American cinema?

David Lowery

I definitely wanted this movie to engage with the archetype of the American outlaw, and specifically the bank robber. I think the two go hand-in-hand at this point. I felt that it would be a disservice to audiences if I made a movie that didn’t honor those traditions.

So rather than really dig into the true story of Forrest Tucker — rather than take the journalistic approach — I tried to take his life story and distill it down to the most familiar beats possible in a heist film. I tried to find that narrative throughline in his life story, and in particular, the two years that the movie focuses on. I wanted him to be the prototypical American outlaw.

The real Forrest Tucker modeled himself after the actors who played Dillinger in the movies, rather than Dillinger himself. And I wanted the movie to represent the version of Forrest Tucker that he saw in his head when he imagined himself, rather than the real guy.

As a result, it definitely pays homage to and engages with the idea of the outlaw in cinema. For better or worse, the heyday of those movies was in previous decades. And because this movie is also set in a previous decade, I felt that it needed to look as if it was made in a bygone era and that the archetype itself would work better if the movie felt like it was entirely cut from a cloth that was several decades old.

Alissa Wilkinson

Did you have any touch-point films that you watched for inspiration?

David Lowery

Yeah, but they weren’t necessarily the expected ones.

Of course, I definitely watched lots of crime films, and went through everything from Heat to The Asphalt Jungle to Friends of Eddie Coyle. I really tried to ingrain all of those classics in my subconscious before we started making The Old Man & the Gun.

But the real touchstones that we talked about a lot in getting ready to make a film were more obscure, at least in terms of what you would think of for a bank robbery film. So the Jean-Pierre Melville film Le Samouraï was a touch point for us. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox was a touch point — I often was like, “This needs to feel like Fantastic Mr. Fox, except live-action instead of animated.”

Robocop, oddly enough, was something we talked about a little bit. Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties was a movie that I just kept showing people the trailer for and being like, “This is the type of movie this needs to feel like.”

Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford in The Old Man & the Gun. 20th Century Fox

We never quite hit that, but nonetheless there was a little bit of it that showed up in the movie. Jacques Tati’s Playtime was something we talked about. All of these influences weren’t really crime movies — Le Samouraï definitely is, but we were pulling from so many other different bits of inspiration.

And as I talk about that now, I think about how I don’t really consider myself that good at making crime movies, because I have trouble with the morality of it. I have trouble with the conviction that the characters have to do what they do. If I were to make an honest-to-goodness crime film, I think I would fail!

I’m always attracted to these characters because of their spirit. And yet I’m always trying to get away from what it is they do — the practical fact of them being criminals and police officers who are engaged in a chase of one another. I kept running afoul of that of necessity in writing this film. I kept trying to turn it into something other than a crime or bank robbery drama, because at the end of the day, it’s not my forte.

Alissa Wilkinson

For me, these films feel like romances more than anything else — romances between you and cinema, the audience and the characters, and the characters with each other. Are you a romance filmmaker?

David Lowery

Oh, yeah. I never set out to make romantic movies, but all my films are deeply romantic and at this point I’m very aware of that. I don’t try to do it, but I always look forward to seeing how whatever it is I’m doing will turn into a romance at some point because it just inevitably always happens. So that is a good way to describe these movies: They’re romances. Everything I make is a romance. And I will likely not stop making those any time soon.

Original Source -> How David Lowery ended up directing Robert Redford’s final movie

via The Conservative Brief

[theconservativebrief]

Gettin’ the Band Together, now playing on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, is an original musical about a down-and-out stockbroker who gets his high school band back together in time to face off against his old rival in his New Jersey hometown’s Battle of the Bands.

That’s it. That’s the whole show. On paper, it sounds pretty boring: a stockbroker? An all-dude rock band? From Jersey? Is this really what the world needs in 2018?

But I suspected there must have been some reason that in this age of high-glitz adaptations of movies and other blockbusters, this unassuming original rock musical had struggled its way from a small-town Jersey stage to Broadway, and so I set out for the Belasco hoping to find magic and wisdom and a reflection of the self, or at the very least a fun evening.

The onstage story of Gettin’ the Band Back Together is a basic battle of good and evil — of following dreams versus settling for mundanity — playing out in song and dance. As a fellow theatergoer who’d already seen the show described it, it’s basically the movie Dodgeball but with rock music. And that’s not a bad thing, unless you hate fun.

Gettin’ the Band Back Together is a warm, infectious delight. Yes, it’s true that the show has been prominently panned because its shamelessly tropey plot is packed with dorky, improv-style humor that constantly pelts you with silly jokes, visual gags, cheesy puns, physical comedy, and references to other rock musicals. But it works anyway, because it’s performed with deep joy, it’s extremely well-sung, and it’s delivered with charm by an ensemble having the time of their lives. If you let all of these things speak to you, as you should, then at some point during the performance, you will inevitably reach that wonderful moment where you are laughing purely because you are laughing.

It’s this feeling that illustrates what ultimately made a lasting impression on me as I alternately laughed and cringed my way through the show: not the onstage battle between bands, but an offstage one. The musical that Gettin’ the Band Back Together is trying to be is distinctly at odds with the current Broadway culture — embodied by an unmoved audience at the performance I attended — that unfairly expects it to be something more.

The truth is that Gettin’ the Band Back Together is a delightful show. But even if it weren’t, I would be writing this review with my heart on my sleeve to tell you all to go see it, because it’s one of those musicals that earnestly strives to be exactly what it is: a good-hearted, shamelessly self-indulgent trope factory built on fun and silliness. And in this age of problematic faves and anxiety-laden media consumption, this show, practically wholesome in its throwback juvenilia, is the rare offering that isn’t going to make you feel bad for liking it — even though it’s inane.

In that spirit, it’s reminiscent of another recent tropey, heartwarming cultural offering: Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. On some level, Gettin’ the Band Back Together is the movie’s Broadway equivalent — a sort of To All the Bands (or Least Rock Musicals) I’ve Loved Before. So what if its storyline is familiar? So what if it openly embraces every clichéd tale of down-and-out has-beens getting their groove back? Just like To All the Boys, its execution is solid, and its cast is charismatic. In essence, it’s a “cheesy cover band” equivalent of a rock musical. And that’s perfectly fine; after all, there’s a reason people love cheesy cover bands.

Put another way, Gettin’ the Band Back Together is one giant dad joke, if your dad were still a kid at heart, and that kid was a giant Nickelodeon fan who never got over Ren and Stimpy going downhill after season two, who secretly cried when My So-Called Life ended before Angela and Brian got together, who definitely got drunk at Bonnaroo and wrote “fuck Nickelback” on a fence while stoned; someone who, in adulthood, probably owns a Blu-ray of Drumline because he wants to be close to that movie in a physical way; someone who just wants his kid to be happy and kind and motivated by love rather than by a capitalist reading of the American dream.

The show sports a decently catchy, fun score by Mark Allen, making his Broadway debut. The cast — led by the charmingly winsome Mitchell Jarvis as Mitch, our stockbroker-cum-band reuniter, lover, dreamer, and Alex Brightman impersonator — performs it with loud conviction. But the real star of Gettin’ the Band Back Together is the book, which comes to us via veteran producer Ken Davenport and the improv comedy troupe Grundleshotz, in a literal “Hey, gang! Let’s put on a show!” process. (Among the Grundleshotz improv performers is Jay Klaitz, who doubles as Mitch’s MILF-obsessed, stoner best friend Bart.)

Grundleshotz, Davenport, and Allen have infused Gettin’ the Band Back Together with so much energy that it leaks out of the stage at random moments, punctuating an endless stream of jokes that succeed due to the sheer enthusiasm and dedication of the show’s cast, and to their own shameless silliness.

Writing down the jokes can’t translate their onstage effectiveness as a litany of Dadaist dork humor, but here are a few: There’s a dead cat. There’s a “nuns and roses” quip. There’s an R&B singer who turns love songs into domestic disputes. There’s a character whose only purpose in life is to take selfies. There’s a spray-tanned villain who drives a Pontiac Solstice and just wants to be loved. There’s a love ballad composed entirely of bad puns about police. There’s a running “your mom” gag. There’s every kind of New Jersey in-joke you can wedge into a two-hour running time. There’s a one-liner that’s such a cute, absurdist mix of juvenile humor and randomness that it literally stops the show.

I should repeat that: The songs are solid and fun, but it’s the jokes, not the songs, that you’ll remember.

Taken on their own, the jokes in Gettin’ the Band Back Together are nothing unique or exhilarating, but they work because the cast is so committed to selling them. In fact, I have rarely seen a more committed, joyous ensemble work so hard to win over a dead audience than I did during my Thursday night show. I’ve never seen a cast sing their hearts out with more glee and vibrance in the face of a crowd that clearly rejected the kind of show they were attending. Thank god for my seatmates Tyler and Bradley, who were there to see the show for the second time in a week, and who were living for Gettin’ the Band Back Together the way only we queer Broadway fans living through the homophobic cake years can.

“This is the kind of show I can take my Trump-voting brother to and we’ll bond over it,” Tyler told me before the show started.

“I cried,” Bradley added.

“It’s so dumb,” Tyler gushed to me at intermission. “It’s so dumb, isn’t it amazing?”

This show is so dumb, and it is amazing. It is so funny, so soft and joyous, that during intermission, I texted a friend who refused to come see it with me solely to upbraid her for her mistake. Meanwhile, my betrayer audience sat unmoved by the endless adorkable hilarity playing out in front of them. And every second that the sea of unenthused faces around me refused to be swept along by the ebullient hopes and dreams of a bunch of New Jersey ’90s kids who just wanted to have fun again, I resented not only them but the modern theater industry itself.

After all, only Broadway could build an American musical legacy out of exploiting camp for its cultural mileage, and yet somehow wind up increasingly abandoning ironic forms of entertainment — including “so bad it’s good” enjoyment.

In recent years, Broadway has conditioned audiences to expect either high-budget remakes with canned messages and blatant crowd-pandering (last season’s Spongebob comes to mind) or high-budget sophistication à la Dear Evan Hansen. Hell, even Gettin’ the Band Back Together, with its crop of references to aging rock artists, was designed to appeal to a certain crowd of baby boomers, to its detriment and their apathy.

But at heart, this isn’t a musical for boomers; instead, it represents and caters to the kind of media-savvy fan who fully embraces absurdity and silliness in their pop culture (the sillier, the better). As such, Gettin’ the Band Back Together desperately needs a younger audience, or at least a better older one.

Who were these people sitting around me who refused to show any enthusiasm for a stellar ensemble that served up some of the strongest group vocals I’ve heard since Evan Hansen? Who were these people who sat largely unmoved while our band of heroes rocked a bar mitzvah, reminisced about the roller coasters at Six Flags Great Adventure, and overcame numerous trials and obstacles to not only find love and happiness but receive a deus ex machina from none other than a fictional version of Aerosmith’s Joe Perry?

As it happened, a good portion of my fellow audience members had apparently come to see Gettin’ the Band Back Together because they’d received comped or discounted tickets as part of Broadway deal websites like Show Score. Through these kinds of watch-and-rate deals, some theatergoers — thanks to retirement, or sheer determination — are able to see upward of five shows a week.

That’s great for them, and ostensibly it should be good for shows that open in the summer, like this one. Late-summer Broadway openings tend to be rare for New York, because the tourist crowd doesn’t gravitate toward new releases that don’t already have strong buzz; you need New Yorkers to see those shows, and in August, they’re often away.

So these websites help fill seats during the offseason, which is a win. But it’s easy to see how they can hurt shows like this one, which wind up being viewed by an assembly line of people looking for deals first and feels second. It struck me that while teenage audiences were being encouraged, off-Broadway, to Be More Chill, on 44th Street, the cast of Gettin’ the Band Back Together was pleading with their older, middle-class audience to be less chill. And, miracle of miracles, eventually the audience at my show thawed out; gradually, more and more of them seemed to open their hearts to the silliness and sincerity of this show, its complete lack of irony and pretense, its sheer eagerness to make you laugh.

But they couldn’t have done it without my dudes Bradley and Tyler, whose constant laughter kept the orchestra section on life support all night. Late in the third act, veteran Marilu Henner, who plays Mitch’s mom with brassy warmth, came halfway up the aisle just to film the two of them — cast members breaking the fourth wall to film the audience is not an infrequent practice on Broadway these days, but rarely is it done with such specificity — as they lost their minds over the big finale number, when Mitch and the band finally play the Battle of the Bands. It’s exciting!

I was happy for them both, these pure-hearted theater lovers receiving a pure-hearted musical blessing, and feeding all their love and energy back to this hard-working, earnest cast. That is what we come to the theater for. That is Broadway at its core, stripped of size and massive budgets and pretension, until all that remains is love and communion.

At intermission, I’d overheard one of the comped five-show-a-week people say, with a shrug, “Maybe it’ll run for a few weeks.”

Fuck that.

Go see Gettin’ the Band Back Together. Enter with love and leave with laughter. May it, and all the other plucky, misunderstood musicals of its ilk, run forever.

Original Source -> Why critics are scorning new rock musical Gettin’ the Band Back Together — and why it deserves your love

via The Conservative Brief