#the filmmaking is so fucking dope man

[chaos0pikachu]

sorry to everybody else this year but 4 Minutes built different it's the hot girl this summer it's part of the hotties club in fact

[burningexeter]

Since just like with a certain voice actress on a 2000s Cartoon Network show, there's not a lot of information on in this case writer/director Shane Acker, the man behind the dark, twisted, action-horror post-apocalyptic animated film 9 from you guessed it 2009.

So here's all the trivia that I could find on the guy if anyone's interested in reading for yourself:

• In an interview, Acker cut to the chase on why he hasn't directed a movie since aforementioned 2009 and here's what he said — "Have a lot of the movies I've been attached to as director fallen into development hell, yes. But the bigger reason is mainly personal, I've just been living my own life. I would absolutely love to direct another feature or anything really but at the same time, I'm enjoying what I already have in life. I'm kind of a schlub that way right down to the fact that I'd nowadays rather sit back on a nice Sunday, watch football and eat bacon and pepperoni pizza than deal with modern studio executives who probably get higher pay every time they yell and scream in your ear".

• He's already listed The Brothers Quay, Don Hertzfeldt, Jan Svankmajer and brothers Christoph Lauenstein as influences previously however recently he's named Terrence Malick, Edgar Wright, Gore Verbinski, Jordan Peele and Richard Kelly as some of his favorite filmmakers.

• Speaking of favorites, he's given some of his favorite movies — Donnie Darko, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Dredd, The Watcher In The Woods (1980) and The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian (surprisingly).... then he gave some his favorite TV shows — Tales From The Crypt, Bob's Burgers, Squid Game, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Sons Of Anarchy.

• When asked what was it like working with Tim Burton since he was producer, Acker spoke high praise saying "I would work with him again if the time comes. Tim was a phenomenal producer who allowed for so much creative freedom while at the same time contributing his unique voice and view to the project".

• On the flip side, here's what he thought of the other producer Timur Bekmambetov — "He was very, very, very, very, VERY fucking russian as all hell. I'm surprised he was a Hollywood producer..... he was quite the interesting person".

• He does indeed have an idea for a new project that he not only wants to do but intends on having it be his second film as director, describing it as "The Incredibles crossed with Raiders Of The Lost Ark, it's an animated action-adventure with edge we haven't seen since honestly the early 2010s. I'm still deciding on whether it should be another PG-13 or an actual R".

• On modern media, here's his blatant thoughts on it so tough shit to any dope who reads this and gets offended because of stupid reasons — "I think it's been awful. There's barely any genuine storytelling now and instead it's all politics. It's all about representation, obnoxious wokeness, pandering, subverting expectations and shoving as much modern bullshit themes into them than actually telling stories with characters who you care about".

• He's most certainly not a fan of a certain film called Star Wars: The Last Jedi — "I know this is saying quite a lot since I've only been able so far to direct one feature but honestly I wish Last Jedi was never made at this point. Not only is it a truly terrible movie but it's created so much hostility, so much shilling, so much toxicity that it becomes unbearable. If this is that film's legacy than it's a failure".

• There is however one positive about all of this and it's that the one movie that he's excited for and interested in — what is it....

[thislovintime]

Peter Tork and Reine Stewart, late 1960s (photo by Henry Diltz via Getty Images); Jackson Browne and Peter, sometime in the 2000s (photo © Benford E. Standley via Pioneer Troubadours)

“Most of the people who live with him (there are seven now) have known Peter for years. Since money has no value to him, and friends do, he lavishes his money on his friends. Peter has spent thousands of dollars just helping, with no thought of getting repaid. (That much has changed — a few years ago Peter couldn’t give much more than a sympathetic ear.) And while most of his friends are somehow involved in the music world, they are friends who went through the same struggles he experienced… Peter apparently has no truck with the countless hangers-on who live parasitically off the newly famous pop people. Peter isn’t as happy as he could be, but he’s relatively content. He’s working at things he likes and feeling creative about what’s going on. He has the freedom to do all the things he wanted to do years ago, such as producing records and making movies and getting into artistic things that are expensive to do. […] With all those people living with Peter now, he has very little privacy, but apparently it isn’t missed. Everyone at the house is working and ‘doing their thing.’ and the house is a simple, unpretentious, very lived-in home. As one person living there puts it[,] ‘It’s a happy, productive household, so full of love you can’t quite believe it.’” - Disc & Music Echo, May 11, 1968

“Peter was an extraordinary man. A philanthropist. The others, who he helped, didn’t have that same generous spirit.” - Reine Stewart, Love Is Understanding (2022)

“[Jackson Browne] nymphed away the summer of ’68 in Laurel Canyon. ‘These beautiful chicks from Peter Tork’s house, they kept coming over with these big bowls of fruit and dope and shit. They’d fuck us in the pool. We’d wake up and see this beautiful 16-year-old flower child who only knew how to say “fave rave,” with a bowl of fruit, get you incredibly high and then take you downstairs and go swimming.’ Other visitors Jackson remembered at musical jams around the house were David Crosby, whom he was meeting for the first time, and Stephen Stills. They were putting together a trio with Graham Nash.” - Rolling Stone, May 23, 1974

“We would catch a ride to Peter Tork’s house on Willow Glen. Peter had been a dishwasher at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and now he was a TV star, a Monkee. Sometimes you would walk in and there would be 12 girls in the pool, naked. One time Jimi Hendrix was up there jamming with Buddy Miles in the pool house, and Peter’s girlfriend [Reine Stewart] was playing the drums, naked.” - Jackson Browne, Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2003

“‘I don't mean to paint such a bleak picture of it,’ Tork said. ‘I still felt I was in the vanguard, along with a bunch of other people. I was pretty happy. I had a circle of friends, and it was a lot of fun. God knows, I went through a lot of scenes and found out what I needed to find out, which is, for instance, that orgies are nice, but they're only temporary and they're not fulfilling.’ Tork's infamous orgies were held at the Hollywood house he bought in 1968, previously the property of comedian Wally Cox. At the height of his fame, Tork could have paid for it in cash, but was advised against it. So he took out a huge loan and spent his money redecorating. In the master bedroom Tork's bed was eight feet by eight feet with a foam mattress six inches thick. He had a four-place bathtub put into the bathroom, along with a sauna. He had Mexican tiles laid. He carved his initials into the shower stall. There was red plush carpeting throughout the house, a wet bar in the foyer, six-by-nine-foot picture window in the living room overlooking the San Fernando Valley. The film room was a splendiferous workshop of sandblasted natural wood that housed Tork's resident filmmaker manqué. The screen covered the entire wall, offering a ten-by-twelve-foot platform for the flower of psychedelia's exploding visuals – viewed by exploding heads of all chemical persuasions, days on end. Just down the hall and across a bridge was another wing of the house. Downstairs was a cabana, leading to a fifty-foot pool. There were no houses behind his, so many people preferred to dive into the pool nude – straight out of his bathroom window. ‘I'd rather have nude swimming,’ reflected Tork; ‘it's much easier. There's a certain charge to bodies if they're covered up, and if you remove that, it takes a lot of that extra energy out of things.’

Originally, Tork brought a girl friend to live with him at the house. Then his filmmaker friend moved in. He was followed by a young woman and her son. Later a friend of his girl friend stayed there. When Tork quit the Monkees toward the end of 1968, his new group, Peter Tork and/or Release, moved in. Often, wandering downstairs of an early afternoon. Tork would come upon two or three strange bodies asleep in the walk-in fireplace. But that was all right. At the same time, it wasn't all right. ‘If you're fixed on the notion that an orgy is going to fulfill you, and one doesn't do it, you're going to try a hundred. If orgies don't do it, maybe drugs will. Like the fixated person I was then, I went from one thing to another. I had to try everything: flower power, dope, orgies, fast cars.’ His sternest nemesis was alcohol. ‘In the beginning drinking was a lot of fun,’ said Tork. ‘I have some memories of things that I did drunk that I never would have done sober, that I guess I always sort of wanted to do. But drinking isn't selective. It doesn't let you do exactly what you want to do and keep you from doing the things you don't want to do. Furthermore, at a certain point, and I think with certain personality types, it's addictive. You find you cannot drink moderately any longer. It finally reached a point with me where it was obvious that I was going to die if I kept up with it. I was never hospitalized, but I could see the path. I realized I was out of control.’” - When The Music Mattered (1984)

[beesmygod]

Hey bea. Your blog is good. Thank you for that. I recently started sort of a movie club with some friends and I vaguely remember you posting some stuff recently about lgbt cinema and basically I was wondering what stuff you would recommend watching.

thanks! given that you guys are getting together once a week, i suspect you want to watch fun movies and not torturous ones. here are some fun ones

- anything from john waters but esp "hairspray" (its just a Gay movie okay), "pink flamingos" (warning for everything but its so fucking good) and "female trouble" (same)

- "but im a cheerleader" ofc lol

- both versions of "the birdcage", the french version and the american remake are delightful. the french is "la cage aux folles"

-"ben and arthur" (2002) is a TERRIBLE amateur gay movie. its an absolute scream. its GREAT

-"mulholland drive" is pretty fucking gay. its also undistilled lynch so be prepared.

-"the watermelon woman" is not a comedy or a fun time but an incredible piece of film about lesbian filmmaking and black relationships. a must see for lgbt cinema

-this one is a stretch but im adding it for my own bias: "victor/victoria" is about julie andrews who is [sits and thinks for a solid minute] a woman who is pretending to be a man who performs as a female impersonator to pay the bills. look. it has this scene and i had a big crush on her in this movie ok

-another on that might squeak by is "dog day afternoon", its a bank robbery/hostage movie with al pacino based on real events. the bank was robbed to pay for pacino's character's girlfriend's GRS. its not at all the focus of the movie but like. its a dope movie and that guy fucking rules lol. only true ally

-"ed wood", burtons loving and lighthearted biopic on the director

-"american psycho" is made by mary harron, a lesbian. a movie about a misogynistic sociopath from a woman's perspective is what keeps this movie fresh.

- and finally, you couldn't throw a dead cat in the golden age of hollywood without hitting a closeted gay man or a shockingly open (for the time) lesbian/bisexual woman. what a wild time. gays really saved the arts

[ultimaid]

What are your favorite movies? I saw you tagging Dirty Dancing so which other ones would you recommend?

!!!! so! anon you may not know this but i’m actually a mass communication major with a concentration in film studies, so this is gonna be a LONG list lmao. i have a collection of 200+ DVDs, but i won’t list every single one of those haha

list is gonna be under the cut!

my favorite film of all time is my own private idaho (1991, dir. gus van sant). it’s a drama about an unhoused gay sex worker with narcolepsy and his quest to find his estranged mother. extremely sad, but really fucking good. starring river phoenix and keanu reeves.

runner-up for my favorite film is jack and the cuckoo-clock heart (2013, dir. stéphanie berla and mathias malzieu). this is an animated musical from france that's based on a concept album by the band dionysos, and it's a gorgeous film to look at. if you like the work of henry selick or tim burton, you'll probably really like jack and the cuckoo-clock heart. it's a story about a boy with a delicate clock for a heart who falls in love even though he's not supposed to. the music slaps and the film is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

i don't watch a ton of comedies, but i'd have to say my favorite comedic film i've seen in a very long time is dr. strangelove, or how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (1964, dir. stanley kubrick). you've probably heard of this movie, as it's considered a classic, but it's still worth the recommendation. funniest movie about nuclear annihilation i've ever seen and holds up even 55 years later.

while we're on the subject of "movies you've probably already heard of but need to watch anyways": pan's labyrinth (2006, dir. guillermo del toro). del toro is one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers (i highly recommend his 2017 film the shape of water if you haven't already seen it) and is the master of the grown-up fairytale. pan's labyrinth is a fucked up movie. it's scary, both because of its monsters (the pale man still gives me shivers) and because of its humans (the film takes place in fascist spain in 1944; suffice it to say some of the characters are reprehensible people). it's a spellbinding film.

let's move on to something more lighthearted. i am not joking when i say that mamma mia! (2008, dir. phyllida lloyd) and mamma mia! here we go again (2018, dir. ol parker) are two of my favorite films of all time. yes, they're corny and silly and the timeline makes no goddamn sense (i could write essays about why the timeline makes no sense...), but they make me feel joy like no other film series can. the second one is leagues better than the first in my opinion (mostly because pierce brosnan doesn't sing at all in the second one), but they're both worth a watch if you just want some good old-fashioned campy fun.

last of these that i'll describe: moonlight (2016, dir. barry jenkins). you have probably heard of moonlight. but i will hammer home that if you are at all interested in the art of filmmaking, you need to see moonlight. i've seen moonlight and i've seen citizen kane, and in my opinion moonlight is better. moonlight tells the story of a young black man's coming of age and self-discovery. it is beautiful and it is heartbreaking and it is honest. i can't count how many times i've seen it.

more films that i strongly recommend: brokeback mountain (2005, dir. ang lee), barbarella: queen of the galaxy (1968, dir. roger vadim), american pop (1981, dir. ralph bakshi), inception (2010, dir. christopher nolan), do the right thing (1989, dir. spike lee), dope (2015, dir. rick famuyiwa), moonrise kingdom (2012, dir. wes anderson), roma (2018, dir. alfonso cuarón), the iron giant (1999, dir. brad bird), and beasts of the southern wild (2012, dir. benh zeitlin).

EDIT: i don’t have time to look up the director or release year now but i forgot. orlando starring tilda swinton. immortal trans main character. it slaps.

[robertdowneyjjr]

thoughts on endgame

if you haven’t seen endgame yet please turn away now because this is full of spoilers.

seriously spoiler nation here. turn back now while you still have the chance.

are you still here?

okay then.

here i go.

it’s gonna get long.

it’s been about seven hours since i got out of the movie theatre and overall? i’m upset. and i’m fucking pissed.

also, if you don’t know this by now, i’m a tony stan. my thoughts are biased. sue me.

listen. it’s not an awful movie. overall it’s an okay film. the shots were beautiful. the actors were all excellent. there was lots of fan service and there were tons of moments where it felt really fun. we laughed. we cried. we cheered. but as much as the filmmakers would like to insist that the film is satisfying, i just don’t agree, mainly because of how they decided to end the story.

the good and the mediocre

to start off, rdj’s acting is great. of course it is. it’s rdj. he did amazing with what he had to work with and most of my crying was because of him.

tony and nebula on the ship was great. he was already so fatherly with her, teaching her how to play paper football and encouraging her. and she was looking after him too. there was so much mutual care there that i loved, and i wish that we got more interaction between the two of them throughout the movie.

that little tear he shed when he closed his eyes to go to sleep on the benatar after recording his message for pepper killed me.

when joe russo said that the film was cathartic and evans said that it’s satisfying i can only apply these words to the one scene where tony finally gets to have his outburst and tell the others off for not believing him when he said a threat was coming. he deserved that moment. his anger was completely justified. and when he called steve out specifically, saying that he said that they’d lose together but they ended up not even doing that? when he called steve a liar? that was cathartic.

nat talking about how she used to have nothing and then she got this job, got this family. when she was crying over clint and what he was doing as ronin. that hurt.

MORGAN STARK. oh my god she is a cutie and all of her interactions with tony are just the best. this is the most valid part of the entire movie and that’s that on that. tony is so soft with her and it’s clear just how much he loves her and cherishes the family that he’s managed to have despite the tragedy that happened five years ago. this relationship is perfect and instead of the rest of the movie we should have just gotten three hours of tony and morgan’s father/daughter shenanigans.

tony being domestic and doing the dishes is all i ever wanted

doctor hulk was an interesting concept and i’m glad that bruce finally managed to find a balance between bruce and hulk and melded the two together. but there were times i do feel like he was played off as a joke too much.

the stevetony content is okay, i guess. i honestly wish we got more between steve and tony settling their differences beyond tony just handing the shield back and letting steve know that he figured out the issue with time travel that they’d been having. i wish we had more of them talking and working out their differences from the past. it jumped from tony telling steve that the trust is gone to him asking steve if he trusts him a little too soon without anything ever being discussed.

like really for a film that was marketed to basically be a stevetony event it didn’t really end up with that many interactions between them so it was disappointing.

i love that in the five years since the snap the remaining heroes managed to become friends. nebula and rhodey is an especially great one. and carol and rhodey’s brief interaction at the start of the film got my carolrhodey heart fluttering.

i do like the team interactions we got, even though there weren’t as many as i expected. it does feel like they’re finally seeing each other as a team again for the first time since the party scene in aou. i especially liked when they were working together to figure out when to travel back to in order to find the infinity stones, and that scene with tony, nat, and bruce together on the conference table. i wish we got more of the tony and nat friendship throughout the mcu.

the entire travel back to 2012 new york sequence was a trip. getting to see these characters interacting for the first time again was great. to see the aftermath of the battle was fun -- how they all got drinks from tony’s bar together. they seemed immediately comfortable with each other which was nice. all of them getting into the elevator together but telling the hulk to take the stairs. and speaking of hulk, bruce pretending to be 2012!hulk and smashing things halfheartedly was kinda hilarious.

the blatant ogling of steve’s ass. oh, sorry. america’s ass. that was great. thank you for servicing the stevetony shippers. and steve’s own comment about it after he got in a fistfight with his past self was funny too.

the excessive use of the word “shit” was a great callback to aou and i enjoyed it immensely.

mark 85 is sleek af and i love a shiny gold thotty boy

the cap scenes in 2012 were nice fan service. steve getting into that elevator with the strike team -- everyone thought it was going to be a reenactment of the scene from tws. but the fact that steve said “hail hydra” instead to throw them off was genius. he looked so proud of himself for that.

i like the rhodey and nebula team up. their dynamic is really great and rhodey has some of the best lines in the movie tbh. i love him.

i’m iffy on this but i don’t like that they validated howard stark’s shitty parenting. call him abusive and leave it at that. sure, he admitted that he didn’t want to turn out like his dad, but uhh i guess he did because look how his relationship with tony turned out. but i mean i’m happy for tony that he sort of got the closure he needed?? idk. i’m not sure about this.

it was really touching getting to see thor be able to talk to his mother again. i love frigga.

tony’s version of the gauntlet is fucking badass. it’s ten times sleeker than thanos’ gauntlet and just cool as hell. and dude! think about it. thanos had to travel to nidavellir to get a gauntlet made that could harness the power of the infinity stones. tony didn’t need to do that. he made his own gauntlet with his own tech and he didn’t need to go to any other planet for that. i love one genius.

steve wielding mjolnir was amazing in that moment. it was super cool, you know. he seemed so natural with it and he was even able to call lightning with it. awesome! but once we got to the ending i was like 😒 was he really that worthy. i’m really salty, okay.

the scene when all the undusted come back, and the other heroes scattered around the world join in, and they appear at the compound for that final battle -- it was incredible and very moving. thanos thought he was gonna win but nah!!! avengers assemble!! dope.

RESCUE. we waited so long and finally we were fed.

peter and tony’s hug got me bawling like a baby. i’m so distraught.

that scene with carol coming in and getting the gauntlet from peter, and all the women coming together and saying, “she has help”?? i nutted. that was amazing.

the bad and the ugly

THE SUPREME LACK OF TONY AND RHODEY CONTENT, WHAT THE FUCK. when they landed back on earth and rhodey didn’t get a chance to hug tony...hm. did not like that! let these best friends hug, ffs. and why didn’t we get to see rhodey interacting with morgan?? this is fake as hell.

it was kinda shitty that steve and co. had to show up right when tony was having a good time with his daughter to deliver the news about the quantum tunnel and time travel to tony. because of course tony would never sit idly by when there’s a problem he can solve. especially not when he’s reminded that he lost peter in that awful decimation five years ago. it’s not in his nature to not help. so that’s what he does. he solves a problem and he goes to suit up again because he would never forgive himself if he didn’t even try.

thor......they really turned him into a depressed alcoholic that’s just playing fortnite at home instead of a ruler looking after himself and the people he was supposed to protect.....they really just erased all his development from ragnarok huh. i’m mad.

also, a lack of tony and bruce interaction?? where are my science bro moments?? they were supposed to be the two biggest brains of the team working on mechanics of time travel but we really couldn’t have seen even a brief montage of them working together to science things out? wow fake!

also now that i think about it, where were dum-e and u?? where???? where were the best bots in the world?????

idk why clint and nat were the ones to go to vormir. definitely was not expecting this at all, but fuck. okay. this is where the anger really starts. okay. i get it. i get that nat sacrificed herself so that clint would have the chance to reunite with his family after this shitshow was all over. but nat had family too. she said it herself. she found her family with the avengers. but they really decided to throw another woman off the cliff to fuel more man pain. great! just great!!

seriously, nat deserved better.

they really. they really fucking killed off tony. they really did that and they had tony sacrifice himself. and all for what? shock factor? it wasn’t necessary. they didn’t need to kill him to end his arc. he could have been permanently injured instead, to the point where he wouldn’t be able to suit up again. he would have happily accepted this as his last mission. his priority was always to get home to his wife and daughter. despite the trauma he went through over the last ten years, the ptsd he came away with after sending a nuke through a wormhole, his team’s falling out, watching his best friend fall from the sky, being betrayed by someone he thought was a friend, getting stabbed by his own weapon on an alien planet, and losing a kid that he treated like his own, he managed to find a sliver of happiness with pepper and morgan. he had a happy ending. the happy ending he had wanted for the last several years. but the filmmakers took that away from him. they took away his happiness, and not just that. they took away a woman’s husband. they took away a little girl’s father. it was unnecessarily cruel and it sends a shitty message. it’s a disservice to tony, a disservice to the iron family, and a disservice to the fans that have stuck with the mcu from the very beginning, when iron man first came out and we decided to hop on for the ride.

tony deserved better.

also, rhodey should have been able to say something to tony before he drifted off for the last time. i was glad that he was the first to find tony, but they should have had their moment. this man had been with tony through thick and thin and he deserved to say his proper goodbyes.

or at the very least, they should have had a moment during tony’s funeral where the important people delivered their eulogies and spoke the words that needed to be said about tony. an explicit acknowledgement from the characters about how much tony had done, how integral he was to their success and survival, and how he made the ultimate sacrifice to get rid of their biggest threat so that the world could be put back together.

the only consolation i get from this is that tony made that sacrifice and died on the battlefield where the rest of the team could see. that the undusted and the living both are aware of how selfless tony is (and has always been), and he gave up his happy ending to make sure that the rest of them got theirs.

well his “i am iron man” was badass too so i’m glad he got to go out with that.

TONY DESERVED BETTER.

MORGAN DESERVED BETTER.

IRON FAMILY DESERVED BETTER.

(cheeseburgers broke me)

speaking of happy endings, lmfao what the fuck @ steve? i’m pissed at this ending. that was honestly the most selfish thing that steve could have done, all because the russos have always had a permanent boner for steve’s story with peggy. it’s just so sad. they won’t let him move on. his character development is stifled. it’s so backwards. peggy had a family and lived a full life without steve, but after seeing her for thirty seconds while he was in the past, he really decided that he needed to go back and spend the rest of his life with her. he threw away everything he worked for in the present -- his teammates, an unfrozen and recovered bucky, his running buddy and overall great guy sam -- for a relationship with a woman that he shared one single kiss with and that he knew for, what, like two or three years? jesus. let him move on! let him find happiness in the present! he never gave love another chance just because he thought he thought he met the love of his life 70 years ago. who’s to say he wouldn’t have found love in the present, huh??

they did him dirty. they did peggy dirty. and tbh they did sharon dirty from the very beginning. but that’s salt for another day.

so here we have tony, dead at 53 who really only experienced true happiness for five years with the woman he had been in love with for over a decade. then we have steve, who was on this earth for 105 years, then went back in time and got another 40 or so odd years of happiness with a woman he had only known for a few short years.

sure. that sounds fair. totally fair.

fuck no, it’s not. it’s a terrible fucking ending.

that’s just shit storytelling and if this was done all for the shock factor to make sure that we couldn’t guess what happens to these characters then it was a poor decision and it completely ruins tony and steve’s story arcs.

what kind of shit ending is this.

i didn’t like it.

[lostduring-isolation]

Today we have yet another special guest on lost during isolation, his name is Michael. T, and we’ll be discussing his life during quarantine, his recently released mixtape When Boredom Strikes, what he feels his future holds and a message to all going through this torturous process together with us. Let’s kick this shit off!

L- Hey brodie let’s start off with the most obvious of questions man ,how are you feeling during this quarantine? What has your routine become, has your drive been affected and your creative process has it been altered?

MT- I feel like I’m on this constant loop, it almost feels like westworld and I feel like a host but I’m really not if that makes any sense? if it doesn’t go watch westworld and it will make sense, fuckin love that show. My drive? if anything I feel more like I’m just planning for more things really, I’m dropping a mixtape of songs that needed to be let go, I’m trying to create a at home station to create more for myself and also just been trying to come up with different methods of staying sane while I’m inside and everyone goes outside and break rules or whatever. Also yes the process does feel slightly different but if anything I’m back to an at home routine, I used to stay home a lot but then I just went out everyday after high school and would work on stuff in other spaces, I’m just practicing this new routine of doing it all at home again so yeah lol sorry if I didn’t answer that right lol.

L- Lol its all good man u went in regardless. In the middle of all the details i peeped you mentioned your mixtape and a few hours ago you played it for me your and I wanted dive right into it with you and ask how did this project come about and what was the inspiration for it.

MT- Well, last year around the spring so that’s like spring 2019 I got a studio space with a couple of friends of mine and we just kind of made art and chilled, they made music and I just did videos, before all that I did a parody ep called one take mic and then did a project with liri those we were cool I was having fun but I needed to do more songs and it almost felt like I had to prove myself but still wanting to have fun plus I wanted to have a mixtape, it’s like a childhood dream so I wanted to manifest that I guess seeing them make music inspired me to go after that and so I did, I mean at times it was tough cause they could even agree with me they wasn’t really fucking with me as a musician lol but I just did what I wanted to do and I could say I’m proud of it and I had fun with it and stuff

L- This sounds like the ill comic book backstory lowkey wanna see what the main character ends up being lol. but seriously man I know you’re a man who wears many hats so what is next for you man, what’s in the works or what do you see for yourself in the upcoming future.

MT-I become a super hero. I wear a cape and a some chicago 1s and jump of buildings and learn parkour lmao what else did you think bro? LMAO jk

but um

I see myself writing more films, shorts , full length, just continue to tell stories. That’s what’s next for me. Maybe some designs here and there but my passion is being a filmmaker. I’m gonna come up with as many stories as I can tell and hopefully film them all once this ends. The mixtape was just a childhood goal but this filmmaking stuff is long term for me and I hope it all ends up working out in the end bro.

L- that’s really really dope my guy i can tell your vision for this 20/20. I wanna ask you one more thing then i’ll let you get back to saving mj and shit. What words of wisdom can you offer to those struggling right now with this quarantine.

MT- watch those shows you wanna watch, read those books you’ve always wanted to read, do everything you’ve always wanted to do that you never had the time to do, be selfish with your time, be considerate and at the end of the day, don’t feel lazy at all or feel worthless cause we’re all in this together and it’s okay, how you feel is okay

oh and p.s. watch westworld shit is crazy.

L- ayyye well there you have it folks that’s all our time. thank you michael-t my brotha not just for the interview but also having the idea of founding this blog with me man!!!

MT- Anytime bro if anything you’re an executive producer for the tape for sure

L- that’s love man stay safe brotha. see you next time on lost during isolation!!!

[neighbours-kid]

A Star Is Born

Heh. I haven’t written about movies in quite a while. Or at least not in this kind of scope. I honestly wasn’t expecting for it to be A Star Is Born that would make me write a blog post about a movie again. But alas, this movie did a few unexpected things.

If you ask my friends which actors I don’t particularly like their answers, should they remember, would look like this: Nicole Kidman. Ryan Gosling. Jennifer Lawrence. Felicity Jones. Bradley Cooper.

It’s not their fault that I don’t like them. I just think Kidman’s face looks always the same, Gosling is…I don’t even know if I ever saw him in something, Lawrence is completely overrated, Jones’ had me mistaking her for another actress and then being cast as a character I didn’t like. And Bradley…well, to be completely honest, the only thing I ever saw him in was the first Hangover when I was in seventh grade, and then he just happened to be cast in literally every movie JLaw was in, and he was just too much of the “pretty boy” that Hollywood wanted me to like, and so I didn’t. Movie after movie came out, and there he was on posters, and I was just like “meh”, I couldn’t give less a crap.

He was cast as Face in the remake of The A-Team which I thought was an idiotic idea anyway, the next thing I remember after that was Silver Lining’s Playbook with Jennifer Lawrence, and I was so fed up with her, that he got all that dislike too. American Hustle (JLaw), Serena (JLaw again), American Sniper (glorification of what I call a serial killer), Burnt (by that time it was just too late for me to like him), Joy (JLaw once more), and so on.

When I started seeing posters and promotion for A Star Is Born my immediate reaction was, ugh Cooper. But it was a music film, it had Lady Gaga in it, who I absolutely adore, and that sold me. I thought, yes, I can make myself watch this despite Bradley Cooper being in it.

And then I watched the trailer. And I thought, damn, Bradley, you can SING! And sing he did.

When I went to see A Star Is Born on October 05, I was expecting to have a good time at the movies with a friend, seeing a film with Lady Gaga that had pretty cool music in it. And that was that. I didn’t not expect to leave the theater two hours later, having cried my eyes out, the first word out of my mouth as the credits started rolling being a filled with lots of emotions, thick, good ol’ “FUCK”. My friend and I were both like, they didn’t have to go that fucking hard, but they fucking did, and it was fucking good.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I spent every day since thinking about this movie. I listened to the soundtrack on loop for most of the last three weeks, I basically know the songs by heart now, and I just saw the movie for a second time this past Wednesday.

My friend, who I saw the movie with on Wednesday, was sceptical of my sudden liking of Bradley Cooper. I couldn’t stop talking about how great the movie was and how fantastic he was in it. And then she saw the movie, and now we’re both here like, what do we do now? How can you go forwards like that.

After seeing it the first time, I took sort of a deep-dive into Bradley Cooper’s filmography and a bunch of interviews. I watched American Hustle, Limitless, and I definitely want to watch some more of his movies. I watched a bunch of interviews of him and Lady Gaga promoting the movie, I watched him and Jimmy Fallon laughing their asses off for six minutes, I watched him and the cast introducing the movie at TIFF and doing a Q&A. I read the New York Times’ profile on Bradley, and I found, that I actually really liked the man. Not necessarily as an actor, but from what I gather, as a person, as an artist, and as a man with a passion for movies.

A Star Is Born showed me what he is capable of when a project is his very own from start to finish. When he writes and directs and produces and acts, when he has his hands in every last bit of decision making, when his passion for storytelling seeps into every end and every niche, when he is the one calling the shots on all ends, he is an absolutely fantastic and wonderful artist. Knowing what he is capable of and watching him in movies that he’s done before A Star Is Born, I am so…I want to say disappointed, but it doesn’t quite capture the emotion. I guess it makes me sad? He has such potential, but I feel like, with a Star Is Born it’s the first time he actually got to use it. Of course, I never saw him as The Elephant Man on Broadway, which I am assuming he was great in. I still haven’t seen most of his movies, and I’m sure I will like him in some of them. But over all, I feel like he has never been able to give a project his all, his whole heart, his passion, because until now, nothing of his has ever been as groundbreakingly touching as A Star Is Born.

This movie is something really special. I never saw any of the previous iterations of the story, but I can already tell, should I ever watch any of them, none would touch me like this version did. I haven’t had this kind of complete and utter fascination with a movie for a while now. I watched some dope ass movies in the last few years, but when I walked out of that film the first time round, I was just blown away. It got me in every possible way.

I knew Stefani— Lady Gaga would rock the shit out of her role. I knew that, just as everything else she’s been doing, she would excel at acting on this big scale. And she did. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more authentic performance.

But Bradley? I wasn’t expecting it. Not at all. Not even a single bit. He completely surprised me, in all the best of ways. Watching this movie you can tell that he poured his whole entire heart and soul into this project. As Gaga put it, every day he left every single drop of blood on that set, giving it his all. And you can tell just by looking at the end product. It’s not just the singing and the acting, it’s the whole thing. The way it’s shot, the way it’s edited. I mean, one thing my filmmaker brain immediately took away after leaving the theater was how well paced it was, and how, unlike a lot of movies I’ve seen in the last few years, it allowed the viewer to linger with the characters. There were so many lovely shots that, had it been some regular Hollywood flick, would not exist, or would be a lot shorter. But Bradley has an incredible eye for this stuff. His passion about storytelling is so evident.

I really do hope he gets to make more movies like this, movies where he gets to pour his heart into every aspect of making it. Just from watching I can tell that he is an amazing director and that working with him must be a tremendous experience. I want to see more of that, I really do.

So congrats, Bradley Cooper, you converted me. I’m a believer now. You’re a fucking talent. I’m rooting for ya, man. 

[itsdannyg]

James Roday on Reddit discussing Treehouse

Reddit with JAMES RODAY

I’m James Roday from Psych and A Million Little Things. I also directed two horror movies for Blumhouse’s Into the Dark Horror Anthology Series on Hulu. AMA!

JAMES RODAY: Roday here. I think. I'm typing things in a box so that seems encouraging.

JAMES RODAY: I think I'm an hour early. That's the first time in my adult life this has ever happened. I'll pop back by a little later. And I'll be READY.

JAMES RODAY: Yo! How about I knock out these early bird questions like a baller.

QUESTION (CharlotteBeer): Given your latest is part of a seasonal series, when did you start work on the script -- and how long did it take you? How did y'all settle on the Ides of March?)

JAMES RODAY: CharlotteBeer -- it all came together very quickly because of my schedule on AMLT. Got the thumbs up in April and we were shooting in early June. It was an idea I had been kicking around for years but current climate and conversation definitely opened a window and my collaborators and I jumped through it.

CharlotteBeer -- Oh, and we settled on International Women's Day. Hulu made it Ides of March.

ASSHOLE QUESTION (yanderebeats): So uh what the fuck was that scene with them putting the snake on his arm? Like what was the direction given to mcpoyle exactly, did you specifically tell him to do the worst job possible or what

JAMES RODAY: Yandererbeats -- 1. Well, the dude is tripping on psychotropes so he's seeing all kinds of shit and the ladies are using that to their advantage. 2. No, I think Jimmi Simpson is a genius and generally requires little direction from me 3 (bonus) You sure this is what you want to be doing with your time?

QUESTION (ConicalSun): What advice would you give to someone that wants to pursue work in film? Directing in particular.

JAMES RODAY: ConicalSun -- Make something. Get familiar with a camera and how to shoot. If you can afford to take a filmmaking class that provides instruction and equipment, sometimes that helps speed the plow. But I'm guessing you know what you like and don't like about movies and it's easier than ever to get out there and make your own content so give it a whirl.

QUESTION (psych-o5life): Out of every character you have ever played, which one are you most like?

JAMES RODAY: psych0-5life -- Probably the dude I'm playing now on AMLT.

QUESTION (seppukuu): What is your writing process like? Do you live out the stories in your head or, since you usually have a writing partner, do you prefer a more systematic approach that involves discussions and outlines?

JAMES RODAY: Seppukuu -- Todd and I have been writing together for over 20 years now. We have such a great shorthand that we can accomplish a lot quickly without spending much time in a room together. Vodka helps. We talk story, specific scenes and generally write the stuff we see best in our heads, respectively. Once we have a very rough draft, everything becomes much easier and the streamlining and polishing begins. That's generally when character voices really start to take shape as well.

seppukuu: In vodka veritas!

QUESTION (Nikesneaker): Hi James!

Do you have a favorite director/actor/actress that you look up to as a “hero”?

P.S. supa excited for Psych: The Movie 2

JAMES RODAY: Nikespeaker -- I grew up an enormous fan of Val Kilmer as an actor, Rick Baker and a SPX Make Up Artist and Stanley Kubrick as a director. I'd add Bergman, Wes Craven, John Landis and Quentin Tarantino to the list of directors I've really appreciated over the years and Lynne Ramsay is an absolute force of nature. I also CANNOT WAIT to see what Julia Decournau does next after RAW...

QUESTION (mooviescribe): If you were to direct another horror feature (not for Dark Horror), what type of script catches your eye?

JAMES RODAY: mooviescribe -- I will def be directing more horror. I love the genre and believe there are plenty more good stories to be told. As for scripts -- anything that moves me catches my eye. Being scared is fun but if it makes you think and feel -- that's the real fire starter

JAMES RODAY: I just realized I can reply to questions by hitting reply. This is GOOD SHIT.

QUESTION (Wizardmer): I am such a huge fan of Psych, and some of my favorite episodes were the fun homages to classic horror movies, here's lassie was my personal favorite. Was there any other horror movies you wanted to do as an episode?

How did the costume design come to life for treehouse? I loved those awesome outfits, super dope

JAMES RODAY: They let me check most all the remaining horror boxes in A Nightmare on State Street. It's just a big sloppy buffet but I loved every minute of it. Costume and mask design were the work of the incredibly talented Diane Crooke. She was one of a whole team of lady designers that elevated every element of Treehouse and I am eternally grateful.

QUESTION (UHeardAboutPluto): Have you heard about Pluto?

JAMES RODAY: That's messed up, right?

UHeardAboutPluto: James, you have made me the happiest I’ve been in a long time. Pysch is my favorite show ever, and that response from you was perfect. Thank you for being awesome!

QUESTION (AsymptoticGames): I just want to point out that I love when co-stars of some of my favorite shows hang out outside of the show. On that note, how was Dule Hill's wedding?

JAMES RODAY: Beautiful.

QUESTION (psych-o5life): Are you helping with production on Psych the Movie 2?

JAMES RODAY: Co-wrote the adventure and we're prepping it now. Steve will be directing and it's gonna be sweet.

QUESTION (bakuryu69): Hey big fan James - what drew you to directing horror. Will you be doing more work in the genre (possibly pineapple related)?

JAMES RODAY: I've been a fan of horror since I was old enough to know what movies were. Somehow convinced my mother that I loved being scared and wanted to learn how all the cool special fx and make up worked. She went for it.

QUESTION (Maxzhouse): Hey man, I really dig your work. I was wondering if you’re into writing and if so what your process looks like? Thanks mate!

JAMES RODAY: It generally looks like one inspired hour of writing a day and 23 hours of procrastination and thinking I should never write again.

Maxzhouse: Ah a man after my own heart! Thanks for answering brother, Hope the best for you and yours. Peace, love & Mercy

QUESTION (seppukuu): You said before that your high school production of Elephant Man was the most challenging acting gig you've ever done. Is this still true, and would you like to do it again now that you have considerably more experience under your belt? What would be another (type of) character you'd find most challenging/exciting to play?

JAMES RODAY: I'm too old to dip back into John Merrick's skin but man that is a tough play to pull off. Moving forward, I think characters that are well written with a real point of view (good or bad) are the ones that we all want to play as actors.

QUESTION (TheReelPliskin): Hey James. I just wanted to say you're awesome! I've been watching everything you're in or a part of ever since I saw a little movie called Rolling Kansas. Can't wait for the new Psych movie and I fell I'll hafta get Hulu now so I can see your new movies. Ok. Enough of that. Now for the question. Outside of Psych and Little Things, what is one of your personal favorite movie or show you've been a part of? P.S. . . SUCK IIIIIIT!!!

JAMES RODAY: It's gotta be Treehouse. And a tiny film I was lucky enough to be a part of a few years back called Pushing Dead directed by Tom Brown. Worth checking out. Important subject matter.

QUESTION (deadpool902): Hey James!

Quick two-part question:

What aspect of anthology storytelling entices you the most?

Were there any horror stories or films that you turned to for inspiration when directing for Into the Dark, and if so what were they?

Thanks for stopping by and I can't wait for your return to Santa Barbara!

JAMES RODAY:

The fact that, in this case, 12 different filmmakers got to come in and do anything they wanted without worrying about stepping on toes or syncing up with any of the other films

Raw, Thelma, Goodnight Mommy -- 70s horror.

QUESTION (tedlogan43): Mr. Roday - Gravy was fantastic, A Million Little Things blows my mind, and Psych is a part of who I am at my core. I wanted to ask what it is like to get to continue working with so many great professionals like Dule Hill, Michael Weston and Jimmi Simpson. Do you feel like your continued projects with them are improved by your on-going relationships with them? Thanks for the profound impact your roles have had on my life!

JAMES RODAY: I am tremendously lucky to have so many insanely talented besties. I am no dummy. I surround myself with ladies and gents that make me look way better than I deserve and will continue to do so as long as they'll let me.

QUESTION (fangirl005): What is the best thing about working on AMLT?

JAMES RODAY: The cast. And knowing that we're dealing with issues that affect so many people every day. It feels good to be a part of those conversations in even the smallest of ways.

QUESTION (jmsturm): Hi Mr Roday, big fan.

Who would win if Shawn went head to head with the Mentalist?

JAMES RODAY: Well he'd def be the comic relief.

QUESTION (TheWalkingGamefreak): Good evening James, just want to say hi

JAMES RODAY: sup

QUESTION (seppukuu): Marvel called and wants to give you half a billion dollars to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Do you accept, and would you still try and shoot it in 3 weeks on a 200 dollar budget instead?

JAMES RODAY: hahaha. that's a great answer and the honest to God answer is that I'd only do it if I thought I could bring something unique or unexpected to the fanbase. Otherwise there are plenty of ladies and gents for the job.

QUESTION (FusionCinemaProd): What would you say is the most creative horror film of the last decade?

JAMES RODAY: Creative? That's pretty subjective. I'd say last years reboot of Suspiria was a pretty big creative swing that mostly succeeded IMHO. And I stand by RAW as one of the best films of the last decade, period.

FusionCinemaProd: Raw is a fantastic film. I’ll have to check Suspiria out on blu ray when it comes out here in the UK.

QUESTION (modsrfagbags): What was your favorite “Gus don’t be...” line from Psych? My favorites gotta be either “eleven and a half pound Black Forest ham” or “the 100th luftballoon”

JAMES RODAY: I am a sucker for a luft balloon

modsrfagbags: Oh shit thanks for responding

QUESTION (imdannyg): Have to admit, the torture scenes with Peter Rake (Jimmi Simpson) gave me flashbacks to your work in Blood Drive. Is there any connection there at all and/or did it prepare you in anyway for this scene in Treehouse?

JAMES RODAY: Welcome Daniel. You know I hadn't thought about it until just now. The two projects are so tonally different but I'll say this -- shooting scenes designed around a character that cannot move is challenging to say the least. Blood Drive probably did serve as a dry run for me without even realizing it.

QUESTION (seppukuu): Have you ever done special effects make-up on another person? If not, would you like to try or are you happy watching the professionals do it for you?

JAMES RODAY: I used to do it quite a bit as a kid. There's a reason I didn't end up being the next Rick Baker.

QUESTION (HippoMafia42): Hey James, huge psych fan here, I know psych the movie 2 will start production sometime this month, but when will that be? Hopefully within the week?:)

JAMES RODAY: Soon. We need a little time to find and build things.

QUESTION (miatosc): What was your favorite scene to shoot this season on a million little things?

JAMES RODAY: There were so many. My scenes with Colin the dog in the "day before" episode were especially sweet.

miatosc: haha! I was guessing any scene with Colin since he’s such a sweet dog.

QUESTION (thepineapplesplat): James! Man glad to hear your free-spirit self. Huge fan of Psych and no matter how much I’ve watched the episodes over and over it never ceases to make me smile. You were apart of a master piece and taught me to always stay true to the inner child in me. Absolute master piece!

Serious question, do you see yourself doing any meet and greets with fans in Canada? Perhaps in Vancouver where Psych was shot?

JAMES RODAY: thanks! So glad it resonated with you. As for meeting fans, I'm always happy to say hi -- I struggle with the format of conventions because I wish fans didn't have to spend their money. They already do so much by just watching and keeping shows on the air....

thepineapplesplat: Yeah definitely makes sense. Meeting you and Dule Hill is definitely on my bucket list. I’m not a huge on meeting celebrities (I think of them as regular people) but psych stars will definitely hold a place in my childhood/adolescence memories. Thanks for bringing it to life! Sorry if I seem like I’m fan girl-ing out haha!

QUESTION (seppukuu): Will we ever see a new play written (and directed) by you?

JAMES RODAY: someday.

QUESTION (psych-o5life): What was your favorite episode of Psych to film?

JAMES RODAY: Probably Dual Spires because it was the closest I'll ever get to being in Twin Peaks.

QUESTION (NateLeport): What was your favorite episode of psych to work on? What was your favorite running gag like the pineapple, I’ve heard it both ways, come on son, I’m Shawn spencer and this is my partner ____, etc.

JAMES RODAY: I became partial to singing suck it towards the end

QUESTION (leeselislisuh): What was your biggest recurring nightmare as a kid? Mine happened a lot when my mom was pregnant with my little sister, and I kept dreaming she'd be born with a full set of very pointy teeth. Horrifying. Huge fan and excited to see more of your work!!

JAMES RODAY: What a question. And what a nightmare. I used to dream that I was a werewolf but I thought that was awesome and didn't want to wakeup

QUESTION (bsischo): When does the next Psych movie come out? I loved that series and I really enjoyed the last movie.

JAMES RODAY: Good question and not sure of the answer. If I had to guess I'd say around the holidays again

bsischo: Really looking forward to it!!!

QUESTION (imdannyg): How did the music choices for Treehouse play out? Priscilla Ahn's Under the Covers is the bomb!

JAMES RODAY: All those needle drops are in the script. I tend to write very specifically to music and, knowing we'd have little to know music budget, I chose songs we had shot at getting. We got all of them. Priscilla, per usual, stepped up and wrote something incredible just for the movie. Another ridiculously talented dear friend who I will employ forever and ever as long as she says yes.

QUESTION (TheWriteOwl): James, thank you so much for doing an AMA and letting us all fan-girl our hearts out. I think it's rare to see someone who moves as smoothly as you do from being a comedic genius in a show like Psych and a thrill master in movies like Treehouse.

What attracted you to these two, disparate genres, and can you speak a little bit about why you think you've seen so much success in both?

JAMES RODAY: Better to be lucky than good and I've been very lucky. I have dedicated myself to being as good as humanly possible to try and make sense of how blessed I've been. Growing up, horror and comedy were the genres I gravitated to the most so they've been in my bones for a very long time. I still remember seeing An American Werewolf in London in the theaters as a six year old. That just about sums me up.

TheWriteOwl: Your dedication and your inherent love for what you do really shows up in your work. As a fan, it's awesome to see - thank you!

QUESTION (eppukuu): Film or digital?

JAMES RODAY: Film. But I do understand the revolution. We shot the first three seasons of Psych on film and Tuesday the 17th was shot on Super 16 which is one of my very favorite formats. There's something truly special about knowing you only have so much film to shoot on and so many takes to get it -- really brings a crew and cast together. And it just looks so good. Though technology has definitely curbed that with HD.

QUESTION (angelusgirl): I started watching Psych after I watched the awesome episode Dual Spires. What was your favorite Twin Peaks Easter egg in the episode or memory of filming it?

JAMES RODAY: The last scene in the diner was a blast because it was a basket of easter eggs. And I'll never forget watching the cast of my favorite show reunite in real time at the Sutton Place bar. Some of them hadn't seen each other in 25 years.

angelusgirl: And a follow up if I may, what did you think of the showtime season?

JAMES RODAY: Well. I loved it because it felt like the deepest recesses of David Lynch's mind were turned loose and who knows if or when we'll get to experience that again. That said, I understand why it wasn't for everyone and if you came in expecting an evolution of the original series....well, you probably didn't get what you were hoping for.

QUESTION (cabose7): How is Timothy Omundson doing?

JAMES RODAY: He's such a badass and he's doing great. He has exceeded expectations at every turn and I cannot wait to bring Lassie back home.

QUESTION (]miatosc): what’s it like working with Allison Miller? She seems super funny and passionate about her work.

JAMES RODAY: Miller is a truly gifted performer. I lucked out getting her as a scene partner. She pushes me, carries me and makes me better. No question.

QUESTION (imdannyg): Did you write Agnes with Nancy Charles in mind? She (and all the cast) is incredible!

JAMES RODAY: We did not but boy did she come into her audition and own that role. When she left we all looked at each other and were like "well, that's that."

QUESTION (seppukuu): You survived the (non-zombie related) apocalypse. The planet is a wasteland. What do you miss most?

JAMES RODAY: Dogs and pals.

QUESTION (mndrlyn): Hi James! Two questions. 1. Does the beard stay for the new Psych movie? 2. What do you do in your off time that makes you happy?

JAMES RODAY: You'll just have to wait and....oh who are we kidding, Shawn doesn't have a beard. I generally spend as much time in NYC as I can and relax by thinking about the next juicy thing I can make. And vodka and sports.

QUESTION (psych-o5life): Do you know what's gonna happen in AMLT season 2?

JAMES RODAY: I may know a thing or two -- which still leaves close to a million

JAMES RODAY: You awesome ladies and gents I'm gonna wrap this up in the next five minutes. We've actually gone over an hour and I don't want to break Reddit.

QUESTION (imdannyg): What are the most difficult constraints to overcome with a limited budget such as this? Is it just time, is it human resources, is it gadget/technology oriented issues? What extra thing would help the most with a limited budget like Treehouse?

JAMES RODAY: All of the above. And I would always choose time over money.

QUESTION (SydneyHollow): Shawn was a big hero of mine for a long time. Then I realized over time that Shawn is a huge dick. Nevertheless, your ability to breathe such life into his character is nothing short of amazing. All the actors on Psych, really, are truly gifted!

​Did you ever have doubts about how successful Psych would be?

JAMES RODAY: Hahaha! I love this. And believe me the longer the show ran, the more challenging it became to keep a character like Shawn digestible. It's like watching Puck of Peter Pan for muuuuch longer than a movie or a play. But yes, that was a wonderful group of actors and humans and we are family. Lightning in a bottle to be sure. The success of Psych never ceases to amaze me. Truly. And that's all because of the fans. 100 percent.

QUESTION (JessicaSimbro): In writing a female role for one of your films, what personality traits does an attractive woman have in your mind? And what then makes that same woman gaspingly frightening?

JAMES RODAY: I believe attractiveness lives primarily on the inside. I'd say the same for what makes anyone frightening.

QUESTION (woahbells): From interviews you seem introverted and introspective but not uncomfortable being questioned about both work and personal topics. Assuming I'm correct and that you are an introvert, how do you reconcile that aspect of your personality with fame?

Also, I noticed the subtle pineapples on Peter's daughter's shirt at the end. Was that intentionally done?

JAMES RODAY: Not my choice but I also didn't veto it so...

QUESTION (firmhair): Come back to White Rock. Our Pier is gone :(

JAMES RODAY: Deal. And with that, thank you all for joining me. It's always a pleasure to connect with you all. If you haven't checked out Treehouse on Hulu, give it a spin. I am enormously proud of the work from all involved and especially grateful for the opportunity to work with and learn from so many talented and insightful women. Be kind to yourselves and others and get ready for a million little spoonfuls of delicious flavor in the future....

[back-and-totheleft]

Missing the Sixties

As he submerged himself in this obsession, the agonizing memories of the Cambodian frontier began to fade, but he still had to be careful to avoid politics on campus. “I didn’t like the protesters because of the baby-killing image they stuck the vets with,” Stone says. “When they took over NYU after Cambodia was invaded, and all the kids trashed the place, I thought they were nuts. I said, ‘If you want to protest, let’s go to Washington and do it right. Let’s form a guerrilla unit like the Viet Cong, put snipers on rooftops and really go after the system. I’ll get a sniperscope and do Nixon.’ I mean, part of me wanted to kill. If the right people had said the right things to me, I might have gone after him. I believed in Morrison’s incantation, ‘Break on through. Kill the pigs. Destroy. Loot. Fuck your mother.’ All that shit. Anything goes. I would’ve tried anything in that [PTSD] state of mind. I mean, let’s take over the fucking country, but don’t give me this jerk-off-parading-down-Wall-Street-making-films kind of crap and expect to change the system.”

Ironically, years later, the film school student who was most successful at influencing the system through films would be Oliver Stone. Yet this man so associated with the extolling of the sixties really didn’t get to experience much of it. “Yeah, I missed out on the sixties,’ Stone admits. “I thought they were horrible. I was doing as much dope and acid as the hippies, but The Big Chill is like a foreign movie to me. Platoon was my Big Chill. I’m not angry about it, but I am saddened that I missed it - especially the healthy male/female relationships.”

-James Riordan, Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker (p70-71) [x]

[filmbutch]

honestly if u got good gay movie recs... i would totally appreciate them! i’ve seen most of the popular good ones but i’d love to hear abt more

Just in case you or other people have missed one of the more popular ones, I want to start by saying But I’m a Cheerleader is my favorite and is at the top of most lesbian movie lists for a good reason. A lot of other lists have included the movies Imagine Me & You, Carol, and The Handmaiden, which are also all great. Almost everyone has heard of Blue is the Warmest Color, which I’ve only seen once a long time ago but would not recommend because of the way the director treated the actresses especially during the filming of the sex scene.

Anyways this list became more detailed than I originally intended so I’m just gonna put my recs below the cut lol

Movies  that aren’t sad (or are only partially sad):

Desert Hearts (1985) - one of the first (if not the first) movies about a romantic relationship between women that  doesn’t end in one or both of them dying or leaving the other to be with a man. Directed by Donna Deitch who is gay.

D.E.B.S. (2004) - probably the most fun/light hearted movie I’ve seen that’s centered around a romance between two women. It’s a cheesy movie about a spy who falls in love with a villain and is written and directed by Angela Robinson who is bi.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love (1995) - cute and kinda cheesy teen rom com written and directed by Maria Maggenti who is bi.

The Watermelon Woman (1996) - a lesbian filmmaker works on a documentary about a black actress from the 1930s. The film explores themes of how there are gaps in recorded history, and how race effects relationships. It was written and directed by Cheryl Dunye, making it the first (known/more popular) feature film directed by a black lesbian.

If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000) - explores the lives of three lesbian couples who happened to live in the same house at different periods of time. The first part takes place in 1961 and is sad, the second part takes place in 1972 and is the part all those butch Chloe Sevigny gifs are from, and the last part takes place in 2000 and stars Ellen.

Saving Face (2004) - super cute and good rom com about a Chinese American lesbian and her traditionalist mother written and directed by Alice Wu  who is a lesbian.

The Runaways (2010) - if ur gay for rock n roll please watch this. I love bicon Joan Jett

Cloudburst (2011) - about an older lesbian couple who go on a road trip to get married and the ending is kind of sad but it’s worth watching imo.

Pariah (2011) - about a butch lesbian teenager growing up in Brooklyn. It’s really sad in some parts but by the end she’s very at peace with herself. Written and directed by Dee Rees who is a lesbian.

Life Partners (2014) - cute movie about the friendship between a straight woman and a lesbian and how their friendship changes when the straight woman gets married

Boy Meets Girl (2015) - about a bisexual trans girl (played by a trans actress) who wants to go to college be a fashion designerGrandma (2015) - Lily Tomlin plays a lesbian grandma who helps her granddaughter get money to have an abortion

Dope (2015) - tbh the lesbian isn’t even the main character, but it’s a cute movie and Kiersey Clemons is hot so it’s on here anyway

The Intervention (2016) - Clea DuVall and Natasha Lyonne play a couple again, Melanie Lynskey and Alia Shawkat are also in it. Written and directed by Clea DuVall who is a lesbianProfessor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) - probably not super historically accurate tbh but it’s about the polyamorous relationship between the creator of Wonder Woman, his wife, and their lover. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie focused just as much if not more on the relationship between the two women as it did on their relationship to the man. It is written and directed by Angela Robinson, a bi woman.

Battle of the Sexes (2017) - I know people on here don’t like Emma Stone but Billie Jean King is cool as fuck, the scenes between her and Marilyn were beautiful, and this movie was underrated

Movies that are pretty sad throughout but good:

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) - not as gay as the book and the ending (and other parts) are sad, but I would die for the main character (and butch icon) Idgie.

Lovesong (2016) - two women are probably in love with each other go on a road trip but one of them is getting married to a man :( the other one is played by Jenna Malone though who I’ve been wanting to play gay since she played Johanna in the Hunger Games so :) ?

Novitiate (2017) - lesbian nuns, Catholic guilt, idk it’s good though

Movies that didn’t necessarily fit into the other categories because they are either intense, weird, and/or  involve murder:

Born in Flames (1983) - I wasn’t really sure what category to put this movie in since its style is so different from the others, but it’s about activists fighting for women’s liberation in a fictional version of the US where there has been a socialist revolution that promised to make things better, but put off women’s rights in the process. Anyone interested in feminism and leftist politics should check it out. It was made by Lizzie Borden, who is bisexual.

Heavenly Creatures (1994) - a movie about a super intense childhood friendship that gets pretty dark, which I know it’s a trope, but I liked this movie anyway idk

Mulholland Drive (2001) - the most real thing in this movie about surrealist Hollywood was the relationship between the two women

Monster (2003) - based on the life of  serial killer Aileen Wuornos. It’s super violent/depressing/disturbing, but worth the watch imo. Directed by Patty Jenkins who directed Wonder Woman.

Jennifer’s Body (2009) - some people like to argue over whether they were actually gay or not but like…they were…it was also directed and written by women.

Addicted to Fresno (2015) - two sisters accidentally murder someone and try to cover it up. Written by Karey Dornetto who is gay and directed by Jamie Babbit who is a lesbian and also wrote/directed But I’m a Cheerleader.

Women Who Kill (2016) - about exes who are true crime podcasters. One of them starts dating someone and the other thinks her new girlfriend might be a murderer. Super interesting and can be interpreted as a metaphor for internalized homophobia. Written and directed by Ingrid Jungermann who is gay.

Atomic Blonde (2017) - bisexual spy Charlize Theron. I am gay. It falls into some bad tropes but I. Am. Gay.

Thelma (2017) - a Norwegian movie about a lesbian with supernatural abilities. It might be my favorite movie of 2017 tbh.

Documentaries:

Out in the Night (2014) - a really depressing and frustrating doc about a group of black lesbians who were unfairly imprisoned after fighting back against their attacker

Gender Troubles: The Butches (2016) - a doc about butches and gender presentation

Movies that are coming out soon that I wanna see:

Colette

Duck Butter

Hearts Beat Loud

Lizzie

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Tully

Vita and Virginia

Wild Nights With Emily

[booklust]

Futurelit Vol 5: Grace Byron

This time around, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Grace Byron, the Brooklyn-based columnist, writer and filmmaker and all-around brilliant, benevolent creative spirit whose recent book release party for NB Carrie Bradshaw (read it here via Epigraph Mag!) at Babycastles solidified my love for her and her work. 

This interview was the first time I had the opportunity to conduct a classic interview over the phone instead of over text chat, or as I like to call it for reasons I’d gladly explain to you over a glass of wine, “The Tony Hawk Method.”

This resulted in a truly gorgeous conversation that flows synaptically and always takes surprising directions (Twin Peaks, the afterlife, and a tender moment involving Coldplay that occurs towards the end---when you see it then you’ll understand!). It also brought me right back to the days at my editorial internship where I would transcribe hours of interviews, but in a good way this time. I took great pains to not only get the content and diction right, but to convey the undertones of our exchange that made it so vibrant. Which, interestingly enough, makes it take on the visual form of a text chat.

Check out our conversation at the jump, with gorgeous illustrations by Becky Ebben:

You do a column called “Trans Monogamist” for the Bushwick Daily (I binged that…it’s really dope) and your latest project is NB Carrie Bradshaw (which is out now!). So I’m curious, what sort of came first: your interest in the format of an advice columnist/relationship columnist,  or your love of Carrie Bradshaw?

Actually--I didn’t start watching Sex and the City until January 2017, which everyone is sort of super surprised by, and honestly? Me fucking too. Not that it’s a perfect show, but the aesthetic signals that it’s something that I should have seen a long time ago. It took me a long time to get to it. I had heard a lot of the negative stuff, which there is a lot of, and rightfully so. There’s this one terrible bisexual episode where Carrie’s just like, “I just don’t know….he’s bi .” And I’m just like… “Girl, so what.” The point is, the column writing came sort of naturally. I had a column a few years ago at my paper called Queer Art Vibes before I had even seen Sex and the City. And I was mostly writing about art, and capitalism, artists, and things I was finding interesting aesthetically. The last column that I wrote was after I had a break-up, and it was called “How To Date an Anarchist.”

Oh my God

And it got like, no comments. Because most of the columns that I was writing were about trans identity and stuff. I got all these comments like, “Why can’t people just make up their minds about gender?” And I’m just like, that’s completely irrelevant to what I’m talking about. So this column got no comments at all. There’s this huge anarchist population at Indiana University. It just closed down this month, but we had this huge anarchist bookstore that was this huge draw for the punk scene.

It was a column that didn’t make sense for where I was writing. But then as I was watching Sex and the City, and as I was doing a lot more dating my last year in college, I was thinking “yeah, this is really important to talk about.” And I started thinking of dating as a political and aesthetic and emotional practice. It’s more using this pop culture phenomenon to let people understand something about what it’s like to be trans and dating. It’s not like it’s me and my three friends that are all going through the same things. Or it’s not like me and my straight girlfriends talking about how our experiences are different. Or me and someone who is nonbinary even talking about how it’s different for both of us. But I do like that element of friendship in it, that element of comradery.  But I think it’s interesting now that shows act like there’s this group of 4 friends and they’re all the same. And that was never my experience? You know, there’s always a nonbinary person, a lesbian person, and...maybe a straight man.

LOL the token straight

Right. At least that’s my college experience, where I’ve never had a group of friends that were all the same. There were always at least one other gay or queer person. It’s a helpful lens to think about dating, and think about dating how much it’s changed since the early 2000s. A column is a dispatch from the front lines, like “this is what happened this month! How’s it going with you?” The book [NB Carrie Bradshaw] has a little bit of a more narrative arc to it. But in the columns, there’s no resolution. -----keep reading below------

Right, and that’s what I like about it. There’s endless thinkpieces about dating apps, queer dating, etc, and it’s so frustratingly depersonalized. It’s very strange how the discourse tries to force dystopia instead of actually having a comprehensive view of how people feel. There’s a lot more truth in the way that you present dating than how someone tries to dissect it in a thinkpiece.

Yeah, thinkpieces are weird. I love to read them, but I also don’t know how helpful they are a lot of the time. Especially when they try to draw a definitive statement. In some things, sure, that makes sense.

Like in a college thesis, where you’re forced to come to a resolution for your life, pretty much.

What was your experience working at a college newspaper?

Basically, I came to college, and I was on the media floor--and basically what I thought that meant was cross-genre. But in reality, what it meant was journalism. And then I thought, you know, okay, it’s fine. I thought it was interesting. And so I almost went to join the newspaper as a writer and interviewer, I did a few articles. But a rule was that if you were a writer for them, you couldn’t be interviewed. And that was my biggest problem with it--I knew I wanted to do art. I knew that I wanted to get press. I didn’t want to prevent that from happening.

Right after I came out my freshman year, this guy on my floor was like, “do you want to talk about being gay at IU?” And I was like uh….sure! It was weird because it was my first time being interviewed for something real, and I was talking about being gay. But I was also trying to sneak a pitch for my website while doing it, I was like...go watch it! They promptly cut that out of the interview, though.

Good effort, tho.

I didn’t love that environment. I wasn’t taken with it. I started volunteering at a local radio station where I did stories about lots of things. That was much more interesting and fulfilling than the college newspaper. And my friend was like, “do you want to be columnist--we need one.” Not because I was special or anything, because they really needed one. And I was like, “sure.” So I started writing these extremely leftist columns, like “capitalism is the devil, and here’s why : )”

And I wrote one that was like, “nudity in art isn’t porn,” which isn’t even an extreme opinion. But I started getting all of these comments like, “Counterpoint: nudity in art isn’t not porn.” I was just like wow, I can tell that you really read this column….

People just read titles a lot of times.

Yeah for sure. Our campus was filled with a lot of views of all extremes, and not just anarchists. We also had a militant white supremacist population on campus. There were a bunch of protests from that group over the course of years--it wasn’t just one year, or just this year, which was definitely the worse than the years before. I also got tons of hateful comments from white supremacist groups on my articles. So I was just one of the people on the receiving end of those comments.

But as far as my involvement in the newspaper group itself, I think I only attended one meeting. I didn’t really feel a sense of community at IU that a lot of people there felt. I think a lot of people looked down on what I did because it was so personal. It wasn’t like I was talking about music, or like I was talking about hard-hitting stories. So I wasn’t really a part of the “IU JOURNALISM COMMUNITY.” But it wasn’t like I really wanted to be. I would still sometimes get people who appreciated my work, that came up to me and said “I love this, I love what you’re doing,” but they were usually queer people.

Which is definitely the desired reaction, which is awesome. Talking about your webseries “Idle Cosmopolitan” -- what was your favorite audience, or your favorite venue that you showed it to? And what was that sort of reaction and vibe like?

I wasn’t at all of the screenings. It showed at Bloomington at Planet Nine--which is this small VHS rental/DVD rental video place that kind of reminds me of Ghost World or something. I wasn’t there, but a lot of my friends were there, since it was my home for so many years. I assume it went well. From the pictures, I saw that it went well, at least.

It showed at Sarah Lawrence, which I know very little about how that went. I wanted to be there, but I was scheduled at work. Which is a whole thing about how I’m not a full-time artist. I say that I’m a freelance artist, which means that I make MAYBE 50 bucks a month off of my art. If it’s a good month! So I can’t always go to everything that’s happening. It’s an interesting part about being an artist in this landscape. People expect you to be global, and there’s only so global you can be if you’re working class. Which I think is important to be transparent about. It’s not always fun to be transparent about that, but it’s important.

Exactly, you want to be honest about it, but you want to portray yourself as larger-than-life-to get attention, and at least the semblance of clout (whatever that fcking means). But being an artist, you’re a part of a community, and you want to treat that community well. You don’t want to stunt and act like you’re making a living off of your art when you’re not.

It’s not cool to lie one way or the other. It’s not cool to portray yourself as a poor person if you’re not, and I’m not super poor or anything, but I’m not living off of my artwork, and I make a decent living off of my work as a childcare worker. But yeah, you shouldn’t lie because you’re fooling yourself and making art seem elitist.

There’s the lie by omission, in a way. A lot of people are internet famous, or have a certain persona that makes people say “Oh, I want to be like this person, who so clearly lives off of their artwork.” When in reality, it’s probably a side hustle at best.

Or they live with their parents. Or they have rich parents.

It distorts people’s dreams and plans--it’s important to be responsible about that.

Totally. One show I was at physically was at Secret Project Robot, at this festival of poets, and my videos were showing between poets that were reading their work. So that was interesting---I was the only video artist at the show. And as many things as I have tried--I have written poems, but I’ve never called myself a “poet.” So I thought that was kind of cool to have that multimedia experience, to see my videos projected really large in front of a big crowd of 20 or 30 people. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s actually a lot. I remember thinking wow, the crowds are gonna be so big in New York. And they are! But 20 or 30 people is a lot for DIY art. Even if you’re successful, or internet famous--it’s hard to gather a crowd wherever you are.

And it was really cool because people who were actually in the video got to see it, which was cool! Chariot is in it, and he was there, so that’s cool.

There was one livestream and q&a in the UK, which was really cool. And that was my favorite, because the moderator was super smart and always asked good question about the fantasy genre, and its intersections with queerness. It was refreshing instead of questions like-- “Why are you gay? Why is this here?” It was a good convo to have beyond the surface level.

It’s awesome that I saw so many showings of your series was in Indianapolis, in Indiana. You may not see a big crowd--DIY art isn’t an Ariana Grande concert--but What you do see is how it sort of transforms the room, and creates a living space, a community. 20 people is a community. Especially in Indiana.

Right, there’s very established artists and documentarians where the only place they have more than 20 people show up is in their hometowns. Even world-renowned documentarians may struggle to get an audience. Which is awful. But I think that one thing that is happening in the real world is that there are plenty of people I look up to, who are famous, whose twitter gets pretty very few likes! And they may have a huge amount of followers! And I’m like--why am I getting more likes than world-renowned feminist scholars? I think that’s happening in real life too. These people are having talks and showings of their work and sometimes DIY work is a different experience and maybe draws more people than these professional pieces, and there’s a community of people who can see themselves in that as artists.

I agree, it definitely changes the dynamic for people are used to when it comes to art, you think there’s the artist and this huge invisible wall and then there’s the observer, and it breaks down that dynamic.

Right, it changes the power dynamic. The artist isn’t a preacher.  What we’ve seen in DIY venues is, everybody is sitting in chairs. The artist is in the front, but everyone is on the same level. There isn’t a stage to walk down from.

I think people are only starting to observe this change, and aren’t sure what to call it yet. Some people see changes like this as the death of something, like the death of some kind of empire of how art works. But especially with this project, I think I’ve not only been an optimist, but a realist in the sense that it’s for the better. So many people are screaming “death to media! Death to print!” and I’m just over here like, “You’re a Baby Boomer, please don’t talk to me.”

Ha! Right. These media aren’t dead, but they’re definitely dying. But I think they’re going to be dying for a while to come. People broadcasting the death of all of these things---like, they’re not dead yet. The Met is gonna be in trouble, but the Met is gonna be around for the next 100 years. The Met’s not just gonna crumble.

Going back to “Idle Cosmopolitan”--I love how it’s a series of very short films. And by short, I mean like, slightly longer than a Vine length. And some people may come across that and immediately compare the series to Vine culture, but my immediate thought was comparing it to poetry, with a lot of tightly-wound content being fit into a small space. So I was wondering how poetry influences your visual work, or how visual work influences your poetry, etc.

That’s interesting. I actually originally applied to go to college for poetry. I never called myself a poet, but I did think about it for a while. When I do write poetry, it’s usually about nature, and viewing nature through the lens of divinity and power dynamics. Which I think is definitely a big part of my video work. The “Queer World” in my piece is a forest. Somebody was talking to me recently, and said that “I think it’s interesting that the queer world is a forest. Do you think of urban spaces as, like, not-as-queer spaces?” I hadn’t really thought about that. But whenever I think of that sort of the afterlife, I don’t think of cities. And what’s our other option, really? Nature. An ocean would be a terrifying destination for the afterlife. I think that poetry is super important, I think when I’m writing anything, I tend towards a lyrical, poetic style. I love hard facts, but I was never super into Hemingway. I always loved the Great Gatsby. Not that I like showy, hyper-stylized stuff; I hated the Great Gatsby movie. But the suggestion of artifice, the suggestion of things like that, I think is really interesting.

There’s ton of talk about heaven and nature and sin in “Idle Cosmopolitan.” I’m sure it comes from a long line of being raised in Christianity, and having read all of the Christian classics. And as a kid, I was obsessed with the apocalypse. Once, I was between 6-9 I remember looking at clocks in restaurants and thinking, “Could this be the hour of the end?” I remember being super into Revelations, and the ghost stories that my friends and I would tell each other, and often confusing them as the same thing.

I think that’s a form of poetry true, a strange, mental form of poetry. I think the afterlife is poetic, because there’s no concrete that you can provide.

I think in terms of modality, I think I’m always writing in the form of the poetic, even if I’m not writing a poem. Even my column--it’s not a how-to column, it’s not a safari.

It’s not MTV Cribs!

Right! Definitely more reflections.

I always thought of videos sort of in musician terms, like “this is my new album---Idle Cosmopolitan.” This is the tracklist, and each has a poetic name, etc. And each year, there’s a self-image overhaul….well, there’s no image overhaul for me this year, but especially in college I was into that idea, where I wanted to amp myself up every year.

But this iteration, for me, was trying to marry these poetic ideals with my own lived experiences, to make it sort of autobiographical, but still have a flourish. I mean, I was watching Twin Peaks when I was working on it.

Yeah, I can definitely see that influence in there. Where there’s that magic-realism, but it’s so mundane. The suspension of disbelief is so well-dissolved into it.

Right as I was starting to write this, I just finished the season of Veronica Mars---I’m not sure if it directly influenced it…

But it was there

Yeah, and watching Twin Peaks: the Return. What I thought was interesting about it was its formal elements. There was this sort of suspension of disbelief present for both the characters and the audience. So then you’re just like, “Yeah, queer spirits! That makes sense!” So, it’s that magic realism that is super appealing. And also the fact that it’s episodic. One of the things about David Lynch that I’m really into is the episodic nature of his work. There’s this loose play with time and narrative, and it’s an experience.

I think what Lynch talks a lot about, especially in later seasons, is agency. But in Sex and the City, for example--Carrie isn’t a bad person, but she’s not necessarily a good person either. She has affairs, runs around doing whatever she wants, she tries to take a break from dating and has a guilt complex where she feels bad about her actions, and also places guilt on other people--it’s complex, which I think is interesting.

Like chaotic neutral, but a little more complex than that?

Yeah, definitely. I’m obsessed with people who are chaotic neutral. I don’t think I’m chaotic neutral, but I’m fascinated by that those people exists.

I’m a super-intense Virgo, Type A, Blair Waldorf type. I definitely pride myself on hard work--which could be problematic--but I have that crawl-my-way-to-the-top sort of vibe.

This character in the webseries, they’re sort of neutral. They’re a relationship writer, but it doesn’t seem like a main part of their personhood. The only thing that they seem mad about is when their boyfriend breaks up with them, which is fair. But they don’t seem to be making many choices, and there’s something very sidekick about that.

I was in this space in my life where I was having to make all these intense decisions--deciding to move to New York, having to make all of these choices about who I wanted to be as a person. The character is the exact opposite, where there’s no movement. There’s a movement in narrative, a movement in place, but it kind of happens to them.

They get a letter, a pep talk from Fate--and they’re just like, “Sure, whatever, I don’t care.” Then they enter the queer world, and they’re like “Alright.” And then the Blue Spirit is the one who was like, “No, this wasn’t actually a good choice.” And they’re like, “Okay, sure.” They never really doubt people’s motives.

There’s a sort of guilt about making choices that Type A people have. Inevitably, if you’re a type A perosn, you’re going to hurt people. Even if you’re not actually hurting them, you’re going to make choices, and choices affect people. There’s winners and losers. So what does it mean for the sort of stoner archetype, this chaotic neutral archetype, when they don’t make choices?

I’ve never been a chill person, so I gravitate towards writing characters that are like that. Because I’m always wondering….what does that feel like?

Right! I feel like it takes a lot of effort to be chill, which isn’t chill. It’s kind of a self-consuming concept. I’m not gonna say it’s the only real binary, but…

Haha, right! Ok back to influences. Actually, as far as the soundtrack goes, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback where people say it reminds them of Sex and the City, and that it’s derivative. Actually, one person said that the soundtrack reminds them of Rugrats….

Stop!!!

Right!? Well, it’s jazz, but it’s sort of this chaotic jazz.

It’s a typical theme song in a lot of ways, but it’s disarming. Which I like.

Some people said it makes them anxious.

It offsets the perceived chill in the series, which signals you to look harder.

Watching it back, I was like...something is wrong. Narratively, there’s something up. But I’m not sure if that thing ever gets hashed out or resolved, it just sort of hangs like a dark cloud.

Which is what’s so great about poetry. There’s always that lack of resolution. People always get angry at that, where they want to feel satisfied...where’s the sequel at??

Do they get the girl or not??

Yeah! It’s how we’re taught to view life. But especially with creative people, it’s paradoxical--they only thing that makes them (us) feel satisfied is poetry, that sort of form that leaves things unresolved.

Totally.

How has the internet shaped your writing?

The internet is definitely fucked up. It was created by the military, and is now owned by billionaires. That’s already strike one. But let’s assume that the internet is also provides a space that provides more access for more people. But it doesn’t provide equal access for everybody. It provides equal access for a relatively small amount of people. You have to afford a computer, internet access--and even if you go to the library, you have to afford to be there.

But let’s say it does level the playing field in that way---even still, people don’t have more of a chance of getting their art noticed because of it. It does mean more people can put their stuff out there, but it doesn’t guarantee more viewers, or more fans, or some utopia.

The internet has become this neoliberal promise of equality. This reveals itself in every aspect---who dominates media, who dominates internet celebrity, etc. This doesn’t discount the fact that there’s fantastic DIY spaces based on the internet, but there’s a lot being overlooked.

The internet as a structure is racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. Even if we go back to technology like photography, for example, it was a technology developed to best depict white faces. It’s so great that the internet creates a platform for people, but that includes creating platforms for neo-nazis on 4chan, for alt-righters to doxx people. The web is pretty fucked up, and it amplifies our greatest strengths, like community. Especially the trans community, which is so important. But it also amplifies our problems, and reveals where we need to grow.

I don’t think the internet is the devil, but I think it makes it harder for people to feel like human beings. It mirrors capitalism, and degrades human beings in so many ways where we’re expected to become a brand, which is always tied to capitalism. We’re forced to reduce ourselves to something bite-sized, which is troubling me as a person and as an artist.

When did u start writing and being creative?

I was always drawing. I was super into Pokemon and all the Nintendo games. I was into anything cute and well-designed, like Zelda, and anything involving world-building. I was super into maps, and at a young age, I thought, “I wanted to do that.”

At a young age, I wanted to be a pop star. And I made the boys in the neighborhood be my band. Now I’m thinking that was sort of a strong signal of me being gay, haha. Boys---you’re gonna be in this band, and I’m gonna sing Breakout by Miley Cyrus.

I started getting really into bands. I was really into Coldplay, and I wanted to be Chris Martin.

STOP, ME TOO

I really liked “Clocks.”

ME TOO, when I first heard that, I was like, Now….that’s what I call music.

I also really liked “Lovesong” by Sara Bareilles, which is entirely different, but I was also like...that’s what I call music. Also Paramore and Deathcab, and I was like…..this is also Music. I still love all this stuff

I still listen to all this stuff pretty much on the regular, even though I laugh about it Yeah! And at the time, all of these things were coded as feminine. Even Coldplay, which was, not a boyband, but kind of more healing.

Right, like ~emotional boys~, ~soft boys~, this sort of soft masculinity before it was talked about and memed.

I went from wanting to be a popstar, to wanting to be in bands, to wanting to do comics, and then I was like...I want to be painter! I did a lot of paintings, and then I wanted to be an actor. I was fixated on stardom, on theater. I was in all the plays of my freshman year.

Then I moved schools, and this guy who didn’t even like me and stopped talking to me, but I liked him---I wrote this psycho-opera about him. It was all songs about him, and it was super awkward. I recorded an album about him. He started being nice to me, and then I was just like…...here’s an album…

I was like, that was fun, but then I started to getting into Wes Anderson. And Woody Allen, but #WORST. And then Godard, which was better. Then I started making movies. And I saw 30 Rock, and it confirmed what I wanted to do.

I love how you go from Godard to 30 Rock

I know!! I was very all over the map. Then I started watching more experimental films and wild stuff, so it’s been a journey to where I’m at now.

The wrapping up portion, something I ask at the end of every interview...this is actually the first interview I’ve done that’s over the phone, an actual physical conversation. And the form of how I’ve conducted each interview has really affected it.

How would you describe the future of literature in a tweet-length? Or a sort of verbal tweet length, also tweets are longer now so….yeah….

Smaller.

[dougcook]

I HAVE THOUGHTS ON THE DARK TOWER

               It’s weird how in the last few months, THE DARK TOWER is the film the convinced me to write something, albeit something small.

               I’ve never read any of the books. I’ve intended to start multiple times, but tend to trail off a few short chapters into THE GUNSLINGER. I enjoyed what I read just fine. I’m bad at reading.

               I’ve been interested in a film (preferably film series) based off of the books due to my father’s enjoyment of them. I have a vague memory of my father excitedly telling me about how the final book in the series ended, and how much he enjoyed it. He said he didn’t think King would finish the series. I’ve followed the ups and downs of the film’s development for a long time, acting as a set of eyes for my father. I might possibly be protective of the books but my dad has already seen the film and enjoyed it greatly. But me?

               Gravely disappointed.

               It’s not a book, adaptation thing. I’m generally very, very, very forgiving of adaptation changes[1]. Everybody knows you can’t translate books too literally. Sometimes it’s a characterization thing (can’t include first person thoughts). Sometimes it’s a time thing (800 pages of plot is simply too winding and expansive for a 2, at most 3 hour film). But you can’t. And since I haven’t read the books, and know next to nothing about them, it’s hard to quibble in that regard.

               Nope, my problems are all in execution.

               Let’s start with The Man in Black. First, his name is Walter apparently. Oh, okay. I guess. Wait hold on you’ve got a character that in the pre-release has only been referred to as The Man in Black, who comes off as other-worldly and unknowable and his name is Walter? I went into this thinking this dude was like, Cthulu in a human suit, when really he’s just a spazzy sadist.

               The character should be mysterious, in my completely irrelevant opinion. When he casts spells, he should never, ever use his hands. When he talks, which should be rare, he should speak without contractions, stilted yet powerful, distant yet immense. Watch The Gunslinger, firing all kinds of round in ingenious ways, and have them all just stop in front of a motionless Man in Black. Not waved away by Walter.

               And the fuck is up with his, uh, laboratory house? How fucking lame is it that he’s essentially an office manager? He’s not some crazy, ethereal force, apparently. I kept waiting for him to tell Marty from THE CABIN IN THE WOODS[2] that he was gonna need him to come in on Saturday’s to file some TPS reports. It’s not necessarily McConaughey’s fault. These are script/story/direction issues, though McConaughey’s performance is uneven in the film.

               Now, how about The Gunslinger himself, Roland. Idris Elba comes out far less scathed. His performance is small and stoic, and feels right for the film and story, and for the character’s backstory. It’s just…man watching him shoot bored me to tears. It should’ve been the coolest fucking thing. This dude isn’t just a gunman, he’s THE GUNSLINGER. The guy. His skills are unmatched with a six shooter, which is derived from being a relative of King Arthur[3], which is silly as fuck but in an awesome way. Shit, The Man in Black (I am not calling him Walter) even outright states the guns are made from Excalibur. That’s dope as fuck.

               Then Roland pulls them out and, like, it just kinda sucks. There’s a moment about halfway through that was used in the trailers. Jake, the young boy who’s the actual protagonist of the film, is snatched by some guy, and our dude scampers off. Roland demands quiet, listens, and the sound gives us a drop of blood, clanging of metal, wind ripping through a sheet to show how Roland is using the sounds around him to track down and fire at Jake’s captor. Then Roland hangs his head, eyes closed, and lifts his left hand to the left, and just…fires a straight shot that nails the captor in the head. The moment, and the whole sequence leading up to it, exists to showcase Roland’s exceptional skills. Unfortunately it’s actually 2 minutes of Idris Elba firing wildly at things that continually surprise me.

               It’s not totally the filmmakers fault. Two years ago, this probably would’ve thrilled me a lot more. I can explain why it doesn’t in two words: JOHN WICK. In those two films, Keanu Reeves plays a stoic gunman with a fearsome reputation who takes down wave after wave of enemies through his exceptional firing skills. Remind you of someone? Only compare the first scene of John Wick taking down a group of assassins sent to his house[4] to the first scene of Roland in action[5] for the difference. Wick is crisp, intelligent, thought out and quick, while Roland flails and sways. His aim is true, but man.

               This is far from why the film doesn’t work. For an adaptation of a 7 book series[6], the story feels so damn slight yet rushed. Jake meets Roland at minute 25, and they’re besties by minute 50, and Roland is mounting a rescue at minute 75. Jake’s parents are one-note and are offed without us getting any attachment to grieve this moment.

               I hope it’s not over, though. I’m almost always for people taking another shot, and potentially learning lessons from a failure, especially with Elba as the lead. Though if they ever try again, maybe they should just get Keanu Reeves and the crew of JOHN WICK.

  [1] – One that bothers me the most is how the final battle goes down in HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2. At first I begrudgingly accepted the generic, green-and-red-beam-o-war as “more cinematic” but, well, fuck that because it’s not. In the book, Harry corners Voldemort and gives a long explanation about how the last two-to-three books worth of plot had set Harry up with a significant amount of protection in this moment and that if Voldemort didn’t stop he’d get himself killed. It’s a duel, and all Harry has to do is pull the trigger to win. It could’ve been THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, with the camera slowly getting closer to each character’s face as Harry lays it out, intercut shots of concerned witnesses not buying it and fearing Harry is going to get himself killed (again). The tension becoming unbearable until Voldy finally uncorks that green bean-o-death and gets himself killed. Instead its generic and boring. End rant. [2] – I spent the entire movie wondering if that was the same actor until the credits. [3] – The casting of Elba also implies that King Arthur is black, and guys GIMME THAT FUCKING MOVIE INSTEAD OF CHARLIE HUNNAM. [4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3THL_7Z29Y [5] - https://youtu.be/baI2a-u4m-c?t=50s [6] – Full disclosure, I’m vaguely aware there’s an 8th book King wrote after finishing the main 7, but I don’t know how essential it’s considered to the series. Like, as someone who’s read all of the Harry Potter books, I don’t really consider THE CURSED CHILD to be book 8. Correct me if I’m wrong friends.

[theinternetinterviewed]

Crazy Mike, A Love Sprinkler Who Lives In His Vhouse [Van/House]

Interviewing Crazy Mike is like watching an episode of Planet Earth — — the one about birds in New Guinea who have no predators and spend all their time singing, dressing up, and building color-coordinated homes. Most of Planet Earth is about animals that have survival claws and competition brains so to see an animal that has zero of those concerns…it’s amazing what they do with their time.

If you don’t know Crazy Mike: he is a vlogger, lives in a van and travels around America, and is an ex-stuntman. Crazy Mike was doing a stunt on the set of the movie Ghost Rider 2 where he was supposed to drive a motorcycle up a ramp and into a lake but instead flew over and broke many bones. Before reading this interview, watch his video BULLSH*T and the rest of who Crazy Mike is will be made clear.

A: Oh my God. Is this Crazy Mike?

M: This is Mr. Crazy Mike.

A: Holy motherfucking God. How are you doing?

M: I was trying to FaceTime you. I guess you don’t have a FaceTime option?

A: No. I only have an Android. Is FaceTime on there? I don’t use it too much.

M: Sorry to hear that. iPhones are better.

A: They are. I’ve just had an Android since high school and haven’t switched off.

M: That’s the same thing I say about the iPhone. I just don’t want to switch.

A: Real talk.

M: *laughs* Let’s have a real talk. What is this about? Can you give me a rundown?

A: I like interviewing people. I’m an interview junkie. I love reading interviews. I stumbled on your YouTube channel a month ago, binge watched everything, and think you’re a dope motherfucker. M: Thank you, man. I noticed you’re from New Jersey, dude. I grew up there.

A: Hell yea.

M: I have…I had a 732 area code and everything. 732 is my whole town.

A: I’m from Middlesex County.

M: My family lives in Monmouth County.

A: I was looking at some of your old clips and I didn’t recognize any of the spots but I recognized the trees.

M: Those are some Jersey trees. Thanks for reaching out.

A: It’s a pleasure. I just wanted to give you fifty bucks but then I figured, “Hey, I’ll interview him too so there’s a little activity.”

M: Yeah. I like to actually do things for money. I don’t like to just get money. I used to. People would be like, “Let me send you 20 bucks.” I’m like, “Yo, let me make you a piece of jewelry or something.” I want to always do something. I’m about that life. SLAWAA all the way. [Sprinkle Love And Work Across America.]

A: My first question for you, well, it’s actually a statement and question, is: You are an excellent filmmaker. And in your lifetime you’ve edited many different videos. If all of those videos were played one after the other, how long would the film be?

M: Are you trying to watch it?

A: *laughs* I’m curious. If you calculated everything, would it be 10 hours? 30 hours?

M: I would say more like 10 years. I have a lot man. I’ve been doing this since I was right out of school with the VCRs back in the day probably before you were born. How old are you?

A: I’m 26.

M: Oh, you remember VCRs. You remember the Myspace days. I started around that era and have been doing it since. I pop out an edit a week so I’m going to say, realistically, you’d have to sit down for 3 years non-stop. You’d have to pee and shit and eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner while watching my work.

A: *Laughs* What got you into shooting your own videos? How old were you?

M: I stole my Dad’s video camera and played around with it with my friends. I was in third grade at the time, 9 years old. At this auction, I got a VHS tape called Crusty Demons of Dirt which is like dirt bikes, action-packed, ya know, dirt bike tricks and it’s an hour of that and it inspired the fuck out of me. When I watched it, I was like, “Damn. I want to make that.” A year later, I started filming random shit and then four years later I started getting featured in that Crusty Demon series. From there, I took off.

A: Do you remember your first editing software? Windows Movie Maker?

M: Well it was VCRs so putting two VCRs together was my editing software. I would film on a tape and connect it to another VCR and hit play and record and play and record, back and forth, to make a tape that I sold in high school. I was a freshman selling my VHS tapes called Dead Troopers.

A: It was stunts and skits?

M: Yea. A mix between Jackass and Girls Gone Wild and the X Games.

A: I don’t think most people realize how much fun editing is. Would you talk about the fun of editing for a minute?

M: Editing is really fun when you enjoy what you’re editing, the footage, and you enjoy telling a story. It’s really fun. I love it. I absolutely love it. But when someone gives me a bunch of wedding footage and tells me to edit their wedding, it’s not that fun. The whole creation process is when you shoot the footage, it’s your footage, and you get to work with that footage. A lot of the times I have the edit already envisioned in my head when I shoot something. I’m talking about natural transitions. I’ll crank the camera a certain way because I know my next clip will be cranked that way. *pause* It’s like a tattoo artist. If the tattoo artist has a blank canvas to work with they enjoy it a lot more than doing a cover-up of someone’s ugly ass armadillo tattoo on their chest.

A: I hate ugly armadillo tattoos.

M: The guy in Jackass had an ugly armadillo tattoo on his arm. Dave England. That’s why I came up with the ugly armadillo just now.

A: *laughs* Have you ever met the Jackass guys?

M: I probably met about half of them. I never did any work with them. I used to work with Don Vito when we were doing We Play Crazy. Any time we had a big event, Bam’s Uncle came out and he was pretty hot at the time so my whole thing was, “Buy a DVD and get a picture with Don Vito.” All of these kids bought these DVDs and got their photo taken.

A: A couple of YouTube videos ago, you had a call with someone in Bam Margera’s camp about video editing work? Did that pan out?

M: Chad Ginsburg, the singer of CKY reached out to me and told me, “Bam Margera is looking for an editor.” I called and never got a phone call back. So, he either got a new editor or hit the booze.

A: That son of a gun.

M: *laughs*

A: Are there days where you shut the camera off and think, “Yes! I caught gold today.” Do you get that feeling?

M: Totally. All the time. Sometimes I shut the camera off and I don’t know that I have gold until later on. I do this new thing called “unknowingly knowing” where I have the camera on and don’t know it’s recording. I capture great shit off of it. Real moments, man. Anytime you shove a camera in someone’s face — most of the time they’re not really themselves because they know they’re being filmed. But when they don’t know it’s beautiful. I find it more beautiful that way.

A: The truth of the moment. Can you give me an example of something you caught on film but only realized later on?

M: I’ve been keeping my camera on my dashboard so when people come up… for instance, I had a cop yesterday knock on my window and wake me up. I call it “unknowingly knowing.” I know I put [the camera] there and hit record but after a while I forget it’s there. I don’t sit and pay it attention. I’m paying attention to, “Oh. I have a cop in my face. Let me keep my focus on him.” The camera just rolls. Those are the moments where I capture the truth of the moment.

A: Can you tell me the psychological difference between when someone is acting differently on camera and what’s happening when they’re relaxing?

M: The difference is flexing. You got someone with a camera and it’s like, “Yeah I’m going to flex for YouTube. AHH YEAA LETS GET CRAZY.” And then when I put the camera down, they’ll be like, “This is a nice day.” And then whatever happens happens without a flex to it. Which are still beautiful moments. But a lot of people don’t realize [they’re flexing]. I’m even speaking of myself. The only reason I know so much about this is because I speak in terms of my experience. I know how to emphasize the moment. When I see a camera it’s like, camera up — Hollywood time, “BAM. YO, WHATSUP. THIS IS CRAZY MIKE, BABY, ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEW VIDEO? YOOOO.”

A: *laughs*

M: Crazy Mike is always overemphasizing the real Mike. My Crazy Mike way of introducing myself is, “YOOO. It’s Crazy Mike.” My Mike way of introducing myself is, “Hey. How you doing? My name is Mike. Nice to meet you.”

A: It’s interesting that some people don’t realize they’re acting different. They’re unconsciously doing it.

M: There’s also that category of people who, when you put a camera in front of their face, they go completely still. They’re like, “Oh, what’s up.” [boring voice]. It goes both ways.

A: How funny is it when you’re watching your footage and you see the exact moment when a person looks directly at the camera and realizes it’s there?

M: Those are hilarious. I got this old guy [working in a toll booth] that I was chatting with and he’s being cool with me and telling me, “Oh yeah, if you don’t have a real license plate on there then just don’t pay the tolls.” I’m filming him talking the whole time. He even said something like, “you could get me in trouble…” so when he realized the camera was there all of a sudden the conversation stopped. I knew in the moment, “Damn he must have just seen the camera.” Sure enough, I was looking back at that footage and it’s clear as day. He stopped talking to me and put his head down and covered his name tag. He did some, “Yo, yo, you got me. I just said you can go through tolls. Shit. I’m going to lose my job.”

A: Tell me about your toll road jokes. Where did they start?

M: My toll road jokes? Well, they’re not really jokes. It’s far from funny actually. Tolls, I hate tolls so much. I’ve driven through so many. They’re ridiculous. The idea of it, the fact that you have to stop and pay dollars — it’s like $25 to get into New York City. Random roads in Pennsylvania are $20. If I’m paying to drive on the road… it sounds crazy. I’ll pay for registration, for insurance but why do I have to pay to drive on the road? Whoever created that idea, “Let’s charge people to drive on the road,” I think is completely fucked in the head. I’m super against it. I don’t complain about it too much anymore because I realized this thing on Google Maps that avoids tolls so I’m the guy who will drive three hours out of the way to avoid paying the toll. But the good thing is, I’d always be nice to the people at the toll booth. It was never their fault. My thing was, I would give them the money and act like, “What? I pay you money, huh?” I’d act surprised. I knew I had to but I acted surprised. But I’m telling the truth when I’m acting, like, “What the fuck? That’s crazy.” I give them the money, tell them have a nice day, and then say, “Fuck the government,” right after it. Most of the time, 7 out of 10 people will laugh with me or say, “Fuck the government too. It sucks.”

A: We talked earlier about how I live in Jersey. You live in Jersey. That is one similarity. I smoke weed. You smoke weed. That’s another similarity. But there’s a big difference I’m curious about. You have a medical marijuana card, which is gold in New Jersey. How did you get that?

M: I just went to the doctor. Everybody has an issue. It can be something small like appetite, or depression, anxiety — whatever you want to say. Just go to the doctor and give the doctor money and the doctor is guaranteed to write you a script for medical marijuana. You get two ounces per month in New Jersey.

A: Do you have to go to a funny doctor?

M: You have to go to a doctor who does medical marijuana. There’s a list of doctors on this website…NJ… New Jersey Medical Marijuana program…so NJMMP, I think it’s called. It’s a list of all New Jersey doctors that have access to the medical marijuana industry. You can’t go to a random physician and say, “I’m seeking that.” You have to go to a marijuana doctor. Tell them what [issue] you have and say that friends have suggested… “I was wondering… if it would be a good idea….” You can even say it helps you out to simplify what you’re trying to do… “Yeah, when I smoke it helps my social anxiety…I’m just saying.” A doctor will write you a script within an hour.

A: Share your thoughts on weed, your general thoughts on how awesome it is.

M: It cures the soul. It’s a blessing. It helps everything. Can you abuse it? Yes. You can also abuse water. I don’t think you need to smoke as much as some people do. I’ve been there before where I smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke and I didn’t find it enjoyable. I found my enjoyment by taking breaks. When I come back to it, it makes me appreciate it more. Now I don’t travel with it. I usually only have a gram at a time so I can eat it if I get pulled over because some States arrest you for it. Most of the time when I smoke is when I do these house calls all over the country. Whoever is there or happens to have weed, I’ll smoke with them. Which is not everyday. I’ll go three days without visiting anyone. I’ll go three days living in the woods or in a truck stop where I don’t know anybody. But on that fourth day, when I do smoke, I appreciate it so much more. It opens me up like, “Wow.”

A: “I only carry as much as I can eat.” That’s hilarious and makes so much sense.

M: After spending six months in jail, I had to change it up.

A: How did that time change your philosophy? Did you get a new perspective on things in jail?

M: Totally. I have a folder full of writing I did in jail. Jail, I look back on and think, man, maybe I needed to be there — complete solitude, no technology. When you’re by yourself for that long you learn about yourself. You have no outside distractions. Not that I wanted to do that but I was forced to do it and I took it the best way I could. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff, whatever idea I was having, whatever happened to me that day. I have hundreds of pieces of paper. My plan was when I did finally get out I would turn it into visual stories. And I did it already with some. It’s kind of how Trippy Talks came about, when I just talk. I do a voiceover. I write whatever I want to talk about and I do a voiceover and mix it with clips. That whole style of editing came from jail because when I was in jail, all I did was write. I wrote before but never as much as I did in jail. I have all these writings and I was like, “Damn. These are pretty beautiful and I want to share my thoughts. What is the best way to do it?” For me, it’s making them into visual stories.

A: In your Quarterly Report you gave a Trippy Talk and in your Risk of Living video and also in your My (kinda) Serious job Application. How important is it for a person to have a philosophy?

M: Philosophy is your beliefs in something. I think it’s important and yet it’s not important. You don’t have to believe anything. You can just be. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a philosophy on something. Having a philosophy though brings enjoyment out of life by the way you think, so, my way of thinking has brought me enjoyment in my life. I make videos the way I make videos, to share that, to hopefully get other people to get enjoyment the way I get enjoyment. But is it necessary to have a philosophy? Absolutely not. You don’t have to believe anything. That’s the truth of the matter.

A: Word, word.

M: But you have to believe you’re going to die one day because it’s true.

A: Why is that a necessary belief? Of all the beliefs possible?

M: That’s one thing everybody has in common — me, you, and the rest of this world. Our mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, friends, and dogs…we all go away one day. We’re born and we die. As far as what happens in the middle, you can believe whatever you want. The beautiful thing about it is we have a choice. We can choose to focus on whatever we want to focus on and it determines a human being — their way of thinking. If I sat and watched the news all day and focused on the war and Donald Trump…fuck, my life would suck. It would be full of politics, bullshit. But if I focus on the arts of life, the creativeness of life, then life becomes creative. My life becomes what I want it to. You choose who you follow on Instagram. If you follow a girl who talks negative all the time, that’s what you’re going to see on your Instagram every time it pops up. “Oh life sucks. When is it going to end?” Every day that’s going to be on your news feed. You make the choice, which is a beautiful thing. You choose what you believe.

A: There are messages that you often put on your videos, for example, free thinking is welcome — can you tell me more about those messages?

M: Free thinking is welcome is… I welcome hate, positive comments, whatever you think, hey, say it. It’s cool. I don’t delete comments. I let them be. I guess I used to think I could control that but at the end of the day I’m controlling someone’s thinking and I don’t want to do that. I make what I make, maybe, to alter their thinking. But I allow them to say whatever they want to say. It’s a free country. Well, almost free. We have freedom of speech. We can say whatever we feel. Sometimes it might get us in trouble, sometimes in might not, but I promote that. Everything I say, not everyone is going to agree with it and I’m well aware of that. Especially when I talk about things like the military, religion — topics people are uptight about. There is going to be a lot of disagreement. So, I say share your thoughts. Why do you think a certain way? I don’t really appreciate the comment…*adjusts* I don’t respect the comments where it’s like, “You’re an idiot.” Tell me why I’m an idiot. Tell me why you think the way you think or why you think I’m wrong but tell me why. I encourage that. If you hit me with a legitimate response, okay, maybe I have something to think over now. Maybe I just learned something.

A: Speaking of the people who do agree with you, your community, how dope is it to have that many people around the country who will hook you up with a bed or a meal?

M: It’s pretty cool. I am blessed. It’s funny because sometimes I…I like my days off when I don’t really see anybody. My days off are when I’m chilling in nature by myself. I like to be alone. I’m never lonely. But I’m alone a lot. There is a difference. I like the parties and I like the friends and the social interactions, sure, but I also love my alone time. There have been so many times where I have to say, “Yeah, I’ll be in town…” Or maybe I won’t even post my location and I won’t see anybody by choice. But going back to your question, the fact that I have a support system up in here is a beautiful thing. I don’t think I’ll ever go hungry. I just have to post on Snapchat where I’m at. Every city I’m in, so far, there has been someone who says, “Yo, come over, hang out.” My house calls are usually a shower, a bed, and I’m taken care of. A lot of the time they’re like, “I don’t want you to leave. Stay around for weeks.” I’m a love sprinkler. I sprinkle a little bit.

A: If given the chance, would you write a book?

M: Totally. I love writing.

A: Not only a life story book but the way you perceive things, your feelings about things.

M: 100%. I would. My writing is…I kind of already do that but I don’t write words on paper. I write into a visual story.

A: You need a speech-to-text app. It’ll turn what you say automatically into words.

M: I do that with my phone if I’m driving and I have a thought. I’ll punch in my microphone and talk. Later I’ll go back and … what is that word called? Edit *laughs* What do you call it? Edit that shit!

A: *laughs* You’re an editor aren’t you?

M: Edit that shit! Like a finalized edit…proofread that was the word I was thinking of. Yeah I love it, man. I love books.

A: When is Hella Crazy 5 coming out?

M: Ahh…man..you know… I don’t think I’m going to bring it back. There has been…life is full of change. There’s been a change. First of all, DVDs aren’t anything anymore. Seeing a DVD is kind of like, “What the fuck is that?” Kids these days would be like, “If that’s not on my cell phone, I don’t want that.” I still love stunts. I’ll forever love stunts. I do them when I have the chance. But to make a whole project about it just isn’t my style. I’m now more into… I like the vlogging life. I like bits. I still always have the love for it but its not what I promote 100% anymore.

A: If your vhouse [house/van] life ends, would you ever make a full length documentary? Or do you strictly see your adventure as 10 minute long videos?

M: Maybe a 20 minute piece. I have so much footage from my YouTube that I can collect and collect and put it together to make something beautiful. Again, I just go off feelings. I don’t plan to make projects. I don’t know what videos I’m doing the next day. It just happens. All of my Trippy Talks are just feelings I have at that time. I don’t force myself to write or make a video. I don’t have trouble with it, like, “What sort of topic should I focus on now?” It just comes to me. It bursts out of me in a natural way. BAM. I go with the day. I won’t plan for that but, will it happen? Judging off of past experiences, yeah, when I end a big trip for a tour, I’ll make a compilation. My quarterly reports are kind of like that. My Snapchat Adventure I did on Snapchat, I traveled for a hundred days, that was planned. After a hundred days, I would stop traveling. I had all this footage and I was going to make a movie. I’ve done it before. Will it happen again? I don’t know. We will see how that cookie crumbles.

A: Where did you get love sprinkling from? Where did you get the idea?

M: Just me, man. I was trying to figure out what I do. I was a love sprinkler. I sprinkle love everywhere. Not physically with glitter. The glitter came later. I thought, “Man, I’m a love sprinkler.” I’m going everywhere like, “Yo, I just want to spread love and good vibes to everybody.” I make people happy just by chilling so I called it love sprinkling. Then I was in Walmart one day and saw glitter and was like, “That would be cool if I could actually love sprinkle people.” I took the glitter and started sprinkling it on people’s heads and they became so happy from it so I stuck with her. I’m still doing it three years later.

A: How many people in total have you love sprinkled?

M: I do about five a day. So, so many, thousands…thousands…

A: Tell me some things about Jersey, about being born and growing up here.

M: Well, you live there. You can answer that question.

A:I know but I want to hear your answer, if you have any vibes to share.

M: I love New Jersey but I love everywhere I go. I make the best of it. I didn’t like it after a while. I was always like, “Man, I just want to get out of here.” I wanted to get out of living with my family because I don’t like living anywhere for long periods of time which is what I learned about myself. The best thing about traveling is brain stimulation. *pause* I didn’t like [New Jersey] but then again I didn’t have any true reason not to like it. That was just me wanting to move around. That’s what it came down to. But I think it’s pretty cool, man. I have no regrets. Well, my only regret is that I probably would have dropped out of high school sooner. Or dropped out of High School period. I never even dropped out. I actually graduated. But it served no purpose to my life. So I’d probably bring that back and drop out of High School but as far as where I lived — I think it was pretty awesome. I lived five minutes away from Six Flags Great Adventure. Kind of cool. I grew up in the township called Millstone Township. It’s right by Six Flags. It was cool, man. It was cool growing up. We had a lot of farms to fuck around on. We didn’t have Township police. We got away with a lot of the shit we did. It’s definitely a cool State, bro. I got a tattoo of it on my back. I’ve got a heart with everything I love.

A: Sometimes when people ask you where your from, you’ll say something funny like from my mom’s vagina. Why is that?

M: Because it’s a question I get asked all the time. Sometimes I just have to say something stupid because after saying the same thing over and over again it gets tiring. Like anything, I switch it up and catch people off guard that way.

A: You listen to Alan Watts. Can you tell me about him?

M: Oh, I’m on 27%. I can get off the charger now. I was sitting by my charger the whole time. My phone was on 2% when I called you.

A: Bro. Damn.

M: But now I’m good. I’m going to open the door around here. It’s hot as a mother fucker.

A:Where are you right now?

M: I’m in a truck stop headed towards Bakersfield, California. Yea, Alan Watts is a… he’s helped me so much. I listen to his lectures. Alan Watts has a stylistic way of speaking and getting down to the truth. He’s one of my inspirations and he’s shaped the way I think. If I could put him, Terence McKenna, Joe Rogan — if I could put the three of these guys in a blender… WHIRRRRRRR… out would pop a Crazy-Mike-thinking smoothie.

A: *laughs*

M: And damn it tastes good!

A: For the readers of this interview who don’t know who Alan Watts is, can you give a summary?

M: He’s a philosopher who is about the right now in life. He speaks a lot about religion, a lot of his lectures are complex to the point where I don’t even really know what the fuck he’s talking about a lot of the time. Especially when he goes into his religion. Some topics are more blunt than others. He has a really cool voice, a chill voice so a lot of times I would just listen to him at night before I go to sleep. His voice alone would be warming to my heart. And to my mind.

A: Between the We Play Crazy days and now, when did you discover Allan Watts?

M: I discovered him when I first bought this van that I’m living in right now and I started doing van life on my Snapchat adventures. I had all this time to be on the road and listen to music and observe other people’s creations. I get a lot of snapbacks and somebody was like, “Yo, man you should listen to this Alan Watts guy.” I guess I was already doing things [Alan Watts] was talking about so somebody thought I would like him and I fucking loved him. I played him and went, “Wow. This guy is fucking smart. He knows what’s up.” Then I started listening to him lecture after lecture. I’ve heard them all. I’ve read a couple of his books. I’m still a big fan. Just yesterday I was playing his shit.

A: My final stuff is: Can you give three tips to anyone contemplating van life? Three things they should know.

M: Be okay with small spaces. Be okay with parking in public lots. And you might get kicked out. You have to be okay with that. The third thing is: enjoy the ride. Enjoy the fuckin’ ride, dog, cause, let me tell you, it is free.

A: During your bicycle trip through Vietnam, you learned a lot about social skills through body language because you didn’t speak a common language. I found that fascinating. Can you give some remarks about social skills?

M: Social skills are built off experience. Some of the fucking best social skills out there I’ve noticed are from homeless people on a street asking for money. They have so much interaction throughout the day with people. So you learn how to talk to people. That’s all practice. I think our world is afraid to talk to people that they don’t know. They shy away. But every person you back away from is another person you lost. I think I have excellent social skills now. I talk to fifty people a day.

A: My final question is, how can I get my hands on Hella Crazy 3 and Hella Crazy 4 and, more importantly, Crazy Mike Is Dead?

M: Crazy Mike Is Dead… what I’ll do is I’ll send you a link after we hang up, a private link. Hella Crazy 3 and 4, I don’t know. They’re kind of lost in the market. My brother might have some. They might even be online. I wouldn’t be able to get you that.

A: I’ll keep searching.

M: Maybe *pause* Oh, no. I was going to say you can get 1 and 2 on Amazon. I have a distribution deal.

A: Yeah. They just came in the mail. I just got them.

M: Oh nice! Yeah it’s crazy. I don’t even get paid from that anymore. *laughs*

A: Son of a gun.

M: I’ll send you Crazy Mike Is Dead. It’s pretty cool. It’s powerful. It was the first film where I completely opened up on and I was crying and shit. But, yeah, Hella Crazy 3 and 4, I’ll have to say keep hunting because your hunt is my hunt.

A: Thank you for this interview, Crazy Mike. This was a nice time.

M: You’re very welcome, kind sir.

A: I’ll send you a link to this when I write it all up.

M: Cool, man.

A: Have a good day.

M: God bless your soul.

God bless you too, Mike. God bless your bliss. I support your movement of one and appreciate you leading by example for those of us who watch. Do continue telling visual stories. I wonder how we, those who don’t live on the road and have to pay rent, can benefit from your philosophy. We can at least be entertained by your videos. We can learn your openness towards people, your willingness to let surprises happen. I know, actually. Those Mike-thinking smoothies, we can try those. If you blended a batch, they would be best-sellers in the merch store. Do you think you could set that up? I’d like mine with love sprinkles.

Interview conducted 5-2-19.

[mynotsoawesomescenarios]

Signs of Paradise

A/N: Okay, but Mark’s voice in Paradise (you know what part I’m talking about) makes me think about...things that will be mentioned in this fic.

And just to give you a vivid setting for the club. Imagine the set from Girlsx3 and then the garage(?) from Never Ever, then it’ll make sense.

~Admin Allie

"Y/N, get off of your ass and get dressed." Your friend Nora walked out of the bathroom and was dressed in cute shorts with a plain white crop top on. She looked at you as you sulked on the couch in the suite and shook her head at you.  

"But why? We've only been here for a few hours and I want to sleep." You had no reason to be so sleepy. You had gotten a lot of sleep the night before your flight, during the flight and you even started to doze off once again before Nora was fussing at you about getting dressed.  

"Why do you want to sleep when we just got to Miami?"

"Because we just got to Miami. Why can't we just take it easy for the night and then use the rest of the week for our wild adventures?" She shook her head at you in disapproval.  

"No, you're getting dressed. Right now." She pulled you off of the sofa and pushed you into the room you would be calling your own for the next week. She opened your untouched suitcase and looked through your clothes. "All you bought were jeans and tee shirts?" You shrugged at her.

"You know I don't wear all those fancy things like dresses and... heels." You pushed out the last word to show your distaste for them. She pulled out a pair of your tattered jeans and a big, semi-sheer white shirt that said "Punks not dead" on the front.  

"Throw this on and put on your dirty ass Chuck's. You'll have to go with the 'I-don’t-give-a-fuck-but-I'll-fuck-you' look." You sluggishly dragged your feet across the soft carpet that sank under your every step. You pulled off your comfy airplane clothes and put on the clothes that Nora had laid out for you. When you finished dressing yourself, Nora touched up your tragic hair and made it look messy but in a good and presentable way. She stepped back from you and looked at you.

"Hmm, do you wanna throw on some makeup?"

"I don't really care. What do you th-"

"Yes." She ran to the bathroom quickly and got a few of her makeup products. You watched her wipe off a few of the things with an alcohol prep and take out one of her disposable spoolies to apply your mascara. She just put a tittle eyeliner on you and smeared it out to give you a sultry look. When she finished with your eyes, she applied a deep wine color to your lips. "Okay, we're done."

"Thank you."

You two stood outside of the club after you got out of the Uber and looked around the place. It was almost completely empty outside and it was too quiet to be where a club was.

"Are you sure this is the place," you asked her while looking around for signs of a club.

"Yeah, I'm sure. It's one of those secret clubs." She placed her hand on your lower back which told you to walk along with her. "It's in a sound proof basement." She pulled open the door to a run down building and you both walked in. She looked down to her phone and told you that you needed to go to the door in the back of the store. The place was old and dusty, it made you uncomfortable.

"Are you sure this is where we should be?" You usually trusted Nora's judgment but this one time where you didn’t feel too confident in her. "I don't wanna be killed on the first day of our vacation." She pulled you to the back of the store and placed her hand on the rusted knob. When she pulled open the door, you saw a stairway that was lit up by green glow sticks. She started to walk down the stairs and all you now heard was the clicking of her heels on the steps. You followed her slowly and reluctantly, ready to bolt out just incase you saw her get snatched up by someone. You loved Nora, but there would be no sense in trying to fight off a kidnapper for her. You would be better off leaving and calling the cops.  

At the end of the stair was another door but this door was clearly new and had a sign on it.

"Take a glowstick," you read out loud. You looked at the wall and picked up two, handing one to Nora. She pushed open the heavy door and as soon as she did you could hear the soft muffle of loud music. The walls of this short hallway looked to have scrap metal from a plane wreck on the walls and white fluorescent tube lights on the floor. At the end of the hall, you were met with the last door. She looked back at you with slight worry and you raised your eyebrows.

"We're already came here, no use in bitching out now." She nodded and pushed open the door with more strength than was probably required. As soon as the door opened you heard the loud house music booming. You two walked in and you noticed immediately that it wasn't a usually club. The décor just didn’t make sense at all. The walls were all concrete and had huge pillars on each side. There were wire fences on either side, giving the place a very trapped feeling. It was also very long and didn’t feel very welcoming. When you walked deeper into the club, you saw a glass box that was filled with plastic plants and go-go dancers. The seating area was made of deconstructed cars and had gas masks that were connected to hookahs and bongs.

"What kind of club is this, Nora?" You held on to her arm as she walked to the bar, ready to party.  

"I don’t know but everything looks so cool. And the music is so good." She laughed at you with excitement. "Hmm, let's stay sober tonight, yeah?" You nodded at her and told her that you'd take a coke. "Two cokes please," she asked to the man at the bar. "Let's go find a seat." She grabbed your drinks and headed for the rest area. "It says that this place gets super packed around this time so let's sit here until more, and cuter, people arrive." You agreed with her as you held out your hand, asking for your drink without speaking.

Minutes later, the place was filled with people, most of which headed for the dance floor as soon as they entered. The place was lively and the way people behaved drastically contrasted the way the place looked. The people who danced were having the time of their lives and it made you jealous of them. You stood up from your seat and stretched. "Let's go dance." You pulled Nora along and started moving your body to the song. You didn’t know it yourself but you quickly caught on when everyone started screaming "GO HIGHER!" and going crazy. You were jumping up and down with Nora and laughing with random strangers, the excitement from the music hitting you to the core.

After a few more amazing songs you and Nora took your sweaty bodies to the bar and asked for two bottles of cold water. You two were falling all over one another, laughing for no reason, just because of the pure fun you were having tonight. You got your waters and guzzled them down. As you sipped, some water escaped the corner of your lip and ran down your jaw, neck and eventually collarbone. You wiped the water up with back of your hand. When you bought your hand down you felt someone's thigh under your palm. You quickly jumped away and looked to the stranger to apologize. He looked unphased and gave you a cute smile.  

"It's okay." His smiled widened as you kept staring at him. "Three waters please." He held up three of his slender fingers toward the bartender. You tried to rip our eyes off of him but the more you looked at him, the more attractive he got.

"What's your name," you asked him way more abruptly than you meant to. He chuckled at your eager voice.

"Jinyoung," he said with a smile. "What is yours?" You picked up on an accent in his voice this time.

"Y/N." He smiled at you and looked like he was going to say something but his head turned away from you. You looked in his direction and you saw two other men walking in your direction. They greeted you and Nora with polite smiles as they stood next to Jinyoung.

"These are my friends, Mark and Jackson." They both waved to you and continued to smile.

"My name is Y/N, and this is my friend Nora." The boys all started to chuckle and stared at her in surprise. "D-do you guys know Nora?" She shook her head to tell you that she didn’t know them.  

"We know a Nora," Mark informed,"but she's a cat." Mark's accent was different from Jinyoung's and it made you wonder exactly where they were from.

"I don’t want this to sound rude, but where are you guys from? I can't really place your accents."

"I'm from Hong Kong, Mark is from LA and Jinyoung is from South Korea. That's where we all live now. We're here for vacation." You slightly gawked at them not only amazed that they were all from different places but also because you never meet anyone outside of people from your own country.

"That's so cool!" You said with a touch of too much excitement. You tried to pull it back a little but everyone was looking at you with endearing smiles.  

"Excuse my friend," Nora started, "she's not used to hot foreign guys." You lightly elbowed her and tried to hush her.

"Do you guys live around here? We could use someone to show us around."

"No, we're from this country but not this state. But, Nora is good at finding all of the cool places. She somehow found this one."

"This place is dope, it reminds me of a video we filmed once." Mark looked around the club as if he was looking back on good memories.

"Video?" Nora questioned. "You guys some kind of small time filmmakers."

"Kpop singers," Jinyoung said confidently.

"Singers?"

"We rap," Jackson pointed to himself and Mark. "Jinyoung is the singer here."  

"Our group is Got7," Jinyoung said proudly.

"Hmm," Nora was clearly skeptical of them. You couldn’t blame her. These pretty guys just came up to you and told you that they are kpop singers, it wasn’t the easiest plot to believe. You saw Nora pull out her phone and start typing away on the screen. You looked down and saw that she started to do her research on them.

"You can't just google them when they're right here." You scolded her just a little, almost embarrassed of her actions. "Sorry..." Mark shook his head.

"No, we get it. It's hard to bel-"

"Holy shit, you are famous!" They all chuckled and nodded at her.

"We wouldn’t say famous but thank you." Jackson looked at Nora with a wide smile.

"Why don't we ask the DJ to play some of your music?" They looked at one another and had looks of worry on their faces.

"I don’t know." Jinyoung lost the confidence he had before and looked down at his fingers that played with the neck of the water bottle.

"They've been playing music in all kinds of languages all night. These people can dance to anything with a good beat." They all looked at you, still a bit scared of what the people in the club would think about their music. "Do you have any songs you think the people would like?"

"Maybe a few songs from ours most recent album? Some of the songs are good for dancing." Jackson spoke up, unsure of himself.  

"Name a few songs off of it, we'll see if the DJ would be willing to play it."

"All of them except for tracks four and six."

"Hmm, okay, we'll see what the DJ says. I'm sure he'll decide to play some of your song." You reassured them before you and Nora walked to the DJ's booth. He was open to suggestions and said that he would play the music after one of his people listened to it to make sure it was exciting enough to keep up the energy of the club. You listed the songs off to the DJ's apprentice and when you got to a specific song, he stopped you.

"I know all of these songs! We played one of the earlier! I'll get him to play some of them soon."

"Yay! Thank you so much!" Nora grabbed you by your wrist and headed back to the guys who were now sitting at the table you and Nora were sitting at originally. She sat down excitedly and gave them the good news.

"The guy shadowing the DJ knows your music so he'll play it soon!" The boys looked at one another, excited. They thanked the both of you multiple times.

"It's no problem, good music deserves to be heard." When you looked at Mark he was staring at you with a look you couldn’t read. When you made eye contact with him, he shook his head and looked away before licking his lips nervously.

While you waited for their songs to come on, you all conversed about random topics. You learned that Jinyoung was a celebrity longer than the other two, Jackson was supposed to be some kind of fencing prodigy and Mark was good at Martial Arts tricks. They way they talked to you and Nora in such a comfortable manner, as if you had known them for a while. But what seemed even more strange was how well you were getting along with strangers in a club while all of you were completely sober.

"...but we had to get rid of Nora and now we have Coco because Youngjae is all-" Jinyoung stopped his rant about trading in a quiet cat for a dog that pissed on everything. You tilted your head to the side and watched him as his face grew bright. "That's our song. That’s our song Never Ever!" The boys started to giggle with excitement. You all walked to the dance floor and found yourselves in the middle of the crowd.

"Shall we dance~" Jinyoung sung along and held his hand out to Nora and she started dancing with him. Your energy picked up once again and you danced freely to the music, watching the boys as they had random burst of in sync choreo. They started doing a sexy shoulder dance and Mark gave you a flirtatious smirk as he did it.

"If you're trying to seduce me, you're gonna have to try way harder." He chuckled at you and stopped dancing to get closer to you.

"You sure it didn't work? Not even a little bit?" He smiled at you and bought his hands to your hips, making a bold and sudden move. Your breath hitched a bit, clearly affected by Mark's hands on your body. After the first song went off, the club was brought down a little by a song with a sexy, tropical vibe to it. "Dance with me."  

You started to sway your hips while he still had a hold on them. At first your moves were small and hesitant but the song unexpectedly took you over. He looked down to your hips as you danced, mesmerized by the way you moved them. He spun you around and started to softly grind into you, not being to eager or overly sexual with his dancing. He kept his hands on you and a few times he would slightly push you forward to keep you from getting him a little too excited. As you danced, he placed his lips next to your ear. He started to say a line from the song in a low, deep voice.

"I don’t know what you're thinking right now. It's about time we both go out and do something about it, you know?" You almost fell to your knees. His voice was so smooth and seductive. And to have it so close to your ear was indescribable. He smirked at your reaction and held on to you tighter.

"So, you want to leave?" You asked him, turning your face to be way to close to his. He was undoubtedly a beautiful man but his looks up close were extraordinary. Everything about his features made you wonder how someone could be so handsome.

"Yeah, if that’s fine with you."

"Yeah!" You said with too much excitement. "I mean, yeah, that'd be cool." He laughed at your attempt to not look like a total spaz. "Uh, lemme just go get Nora. We promised we wouldn’t split up for this trip, it's too risky." You looked at him, slightly apologetic since you couldn’t just drag him to wherever and fuck him.  

"I understand," he nodded and let you go. He stayed behind you as you made your way to Nora, who was still dancing with Jinyoung and Jackson. They looked like they were having so much fun, laughing like a group of friends that knew each other for longer than they could remember. You didn’t want to break up their fun so you decided you ask them to come to the hotel as well.

"Hey, wanna take this party back to our suite?" You looked at Nora with pleading eyes. You knew she would question you but with the way you looked at her and held on to Mark's hand, she smirked at you, understanding you immediately.  

"Yeah! You guys wanna come along?" Nora asked the two men directly. They nodded.

"But we have to leave after you guys do, just in case someone knows who we are," Jackson told you.

"That’s fine. Um, I'll text Mark the address and you guys can leave in...twenty minutes?" They all agreed to the plan. "Can I see your phone?" Mark went into his pocket and unlocked the phone before handing it to you. You put in your number and sent a text of his name to yourself. You handed it to him and he accepted it with a smile. "You smile a lot," you said with a giggle. " I like that." You walked away and you felt Mark's eyes one you.

As you and Nora left the club and headed back up the staircase, your phone called for your attention. But before you could look at it, Nora started talking to you.

"Are you gonna fuck him?"

"Nora!"

"What!?"

"...maybe. Hopefully. Have you heard his voice? Oh my god."

"You're gonna have sex with him because of his voice when he's that hot? That’s new."  

"Don't get me wrong, he's very attractive, but his voice is..amazing."

You and Nora got outside as soon as your Uber pulled up to the club. The car was silent and made you remember to check your phone.

*What are we doing when we get back to your place?* Your fingers hovered over you phone, not knowing what your response should be.

*Have sex????* Delete.

*Chill, I guess* Delete.

*Whatever you want ;)* Ew. Delete. Nora looked at you and noticed that you seemed to be having an inner conflict.

"What?"

"He texted me and I don’t know what to say."

"Lemme see." You handed her the phone and watched as she typed away. You wanted to see what she wrote before she sent it but she didn’t let you see it and sent it without your consent.  

"Nora!"

"Stop screaming at me!" You looked at the text she sent.

*You'll just have to come and see, don't you?* You had to admit, it was way better than anything you had planned on sending him. You sent him a follow up message with the address of the hotel.

As soon as you arrived to the hotel, you got a text from Mark, letting you know that they were now on their way to you. You glanced at the text before going to your room put quickly clean up the mess that Nora had made earlier while looking for clothes for you to wear. As time went on, you got more nervous, not having any idea how things should go with him.

"I mean, do I just drag him to my room and then we have sex? Or do we stay in the common room for a bit and then I show him my bedroom eyes and then bring him here? Oh go-" You looked to the bed and saw your phone buzzing. Mark was calling you. "He's calling, why is he calling? Who calls people anymore?" Nora held the phone up to her ear and answered it for you.

"Hello? No, Y/N is on the bathroom." You hit her arm and silently scolded her. "What was I supposed to say," she mouthed. "Mmhm, we're in room thirteen o'eight. Yup, see you soon."

"I feel like I could die."

"Oh god, it's just a one night stand, you are overthinking this by a long shot."

You stayed in your room for a little. Just as you were getting up, you heard a knock at the door.

"Yeah?" You heard the door knob turn and Mark peeked his head in.

"Can I come in?"  

"Oh! Yeah, sure." You sat up on the side of the bed while he came in and closed the door behind him. "I didn't know you guys were here already." You really had no idea. You didn’t hear them come in and no one called for you.

"Well, we just got here and Nora told me to come to your room."

"Oh? She did?"  

"Yeah." He sat next to you. The way the bed went down made your body shift closer to him. You were now sitting shoulder to shoulder. "So, what are our plans for tonight?" He said to you with a voice that was clearly shaky. He fidgeted with his fingers and looked around the room, avoiding your eyes.

You reached out for his hand and laced your fingers into his. "I don't know. What do you want to do?" You cringed at yourself. You felt like a teenager who was trying to make a move on prom night and it was so awkward, but in a somewhat cute way.  

Mark examine your hand that clasped onto his. He lifted your hand to his lips and softly kissed it. He laughed at how cheesy it was. You mirrored his actions and kissed his hand.  

"Ooh, romantic." He said, making you laugh harder than you should.

"Shut up," you said, kissing his wrist this time. Your kisses made their way up his arm and eventually to the part of his shoulder that joined with his neck. You laid soft kisses at the base of his neck before looking at him again.

"So that’s what you want to do?" His voice was lower this time and his nerves were gone.  

"Yes." With those words, he let go of your hand and brought them to your waist. He rubbed on your clothed torso for a while before sliding his warm fingers under your loose shirt. His fingers softly gripped your ribs as his thumbs played with the bottom of your bra. He watched your face as you enjoyed his simple touches and fingers that danced across your smooth, warm skin. As his eyes searched your face, he couldn’t help but admire your beauty.

"You are so stunning." His voice was sensual and serious, it was satisfying to you ears but made you crave more.  

He pushed his body weight into you and you slowly laid back on to the bed. His hands were still all over your body when he leaned in to kiss your lips. He approached you in a relaxed way, making it obvious that he wanted his time with you to last a long. He lips finally met yours and they were so soft and welcoming. He added a light pressure to your lips as you kissed and lingered in it for a few seconds before pulling back to give you another one. He kissed you like this a few times, skillfully using my muscles in his lips to make them perfectly firm for the kisses that made your heart jump.

You opened your mouth, making him escalate things a bit and when you did he slipped his tongue into your mouth. Your tongue mingled with his and you got a taste of the fresh flavor of spearmint. You hummed into the kiss and the movement of his hands got bolder. He groped at your breast that were still confined by your bra and held them tightly in the palm of his hand.  

He decided to pick up the pace of things and pulled off his shirt before helping you take off your own. You placed your hands in front of his pants and undid his belt before quickly undoing the button and zipper on his jeans. He smiled down at you and looked at you as you hungrily undressed him. Once you were done with his pants, he laid on top of you.

"You can take your time. We have all night baby." His words made your breathing stop. His velvety voice made wetness pool between your legs. Yes, Mark was a beautiful man and his looks alone would make you want him, but his voice was unreal. It made you feel like you were under a spell every time he spoke to you in that low tone.  

"Okay," you said to him, now willing to listen to and obey his every word.  

He stood off of the bed and dropped his pants to his ankles. He shyly removed his briefs and looked at you while you stared at his cock. You saw his face redden a bit and you chuckled at his expression.  

"Don't laugh because I'm about to make you feel the same way," he said with a joking tone.  

He worked on your jeans quickly and pulled them down along with your panties. As he remained standing, he stroked your thighs and hips, watching as his slender fingers glided over your skin. He got back on the bed and pushed his hands between your thighs. He pried them apart and the cool air made you realize how turned on you were.  

He stared at your pussy with his bottom lip caught between his teeth. You started to feel how he felt moments ago when you were admiring his package

"Mark, stop." You tried to close your legs but he pushed them down, opening your legs even further. His head dived between your legs and his face was so close that you could feel the breath from his nose at your entrance. He lifted his middle finger to your clit and circled it slowly. He moved his finger down and plunged it deep inside of you, all the way down to his last knuckle. He twisted his finger inside if you a few times before pumping it in and out. He soon added another finger and you began to moan, happy to feel your pussy stretch a little more. He lowered his lips to meet your clit and he sucked on it and gave it a few licks with his stiff tongue. While he sucked on it, he quickened the pace of his fingers. Your panting began and your chest rose and fell quickly, edging onto your release. With a few more thrust of his fingers, you came. He looked up to you with a sexy gaze. He lifted his fingers to his lips and hummed at the taste of your pussy.

He laid next to you with his back up against the backboard of the bed. He tapped his leg, inviting you to get on top of him. You climbed on and wrapped your arms around his neck. You lowered yourself on to him while you kissed him, both of you moaning into the other's mouths. You were still so sensitive from before and you were sure to be done soon. His cock seemed to be made for you because even without moving you had gotten so much pleasure from him.  

You started to rock your hips back and forth slowly, allowing yourself to feel every vein and contour of his cock go in you and slide out of you with ease. Mark held on to your behind as you rode him, gripping it tightly because of the pleasure he was receiving from you. You moved your hips quicker and rougher, chasing after the release that was guaranteed to hit you soon. He kissed on your breast as they bounced in front of his face and gave you love bites on your collarbone as he tried to hush his groans. The attention he was showing to you is what made you tighten around his member.

"Don’t hold it in baby, let it go." His voice was strained because of the lack of air in his lungs but it was still sexy enough to make you cum for him. Your body stilled as you experienced your second orgasm. Mark was moving under you, impatient and wait for his own release. He pushed you back into the bed and started to fuck you hard. He pounded into you roughly and his warm breath grazed against your neck as he graced your ears with his beautiful groans. "Uh, fuck." His thrust were no longer precise and controlled, they were irregularly timed and spastic. A few strokes later, you felt him spill into you, every last drop being delivered to the deepest part of your pussy.

He stayed inside of you until he regained enough strength in his knees to pull out and roll over to the other side of the bed.

"Oh my god," you exclaimed.  

"Jesus christ," he said, chest still quickly rising and falling. The room was silent for a while before he began to speak. "Uh, is this a one time thing? Because... I don’t want it to be." He laughed nervously.

"Hm, I don’t think it will be."

[justinmoviereviews]

The Class of 2017

This one is starting early, inspired by my least favorite movie of the year. I’ve got a bunch more on my list I’ll get to at some point.

Strong Island - Yance Ford

I don’t watch documentaries, but of the three I saw from last year this portrait of a family’s grief was my favorite. Because it was visceral and simple, catching a family as it processes the death of its oldest son, and then learns the circumstances surrounding why his murderer was never charged.

Columbus - Kogonada

It’s not just the architecture, which is fantastic throughout--every shot is set up to look as striking and pretty as it can, like a movie that was filmed entirely inside the Met.

Last Men in Aleppo - Feras Fayyad and Steen Johannessen

I’m not gonna say anything bad about this movie. I’m not a lunatic. It’s not an easy thing to see real footage of dead babies, but one of several interesting things in this documentary is how these guys go from digging bodies out of rubble to attending a wedding. Life goes on, it turns out, even in a place like Syria. These are people who fantasize about going to Turkey, but recognize that they’d be greeted with resentment and bigotry there, and anyway feel a responsibility to stay in their homeland. Their happiness comes from being with their friends, and occasionally planting trees, or buying some pet fish. Their day job is rescuing people from random air strikes perpetrated by their own government. They’re legitimate heroes, and Bashar al-Assad is a legitimate monster. One funny thing, the user score for this movie on Metacritic is a bizarrely low 3.3, with a handful of reviews that accuse it of being Al-Qaeda propaganda. The reviews are written by people with user names like MetacriticSuccs, so credit to the Russian cyber agency for their thoroughness.

Detroit - Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow has become the master of telling macro stories about chaos. The first half hour about how riots turned Detroit into a war zone are perfect--maybe her best contained piece of filmmaking yet. When this movie settles into its plot--about how a bunch of racist cops tortured a group of black people in a cheap hotel--it’s such a natural extension of what she’s good at that it doesn’t feel like it all takes place in a single location, even though it does. As the night wears on you start to realize that in black cities like Detroit police were and maybe still are barely disguised domestic terrorists. When a character asks someone “will we be safe?” she’s referring to the cops, but she might as well be referring to the villain in a horror movie. This one shoulda got a lot more attention.

Personal Shopper - Olivier Assayas

I’ll start with a criticism: Kristen Stewart is really bad here. I actually think she’s a great actress, but here she’s a collection of her worst impulses: tics and stuttering, like an SNL parody of her. It’s actually not much of a liability though, because this is a movie that’s entirely about events and mood. I’m like six viewings away from understanding what the hell is going on in it, so here are just some thoughts: the movie does away with any ambiguity about whether ghosts are real. They’re all over the place, haunting houses and generally causing mischief. But the clarity on an afterlife does nothing to explain the plot of this movie. The bulk of it takes the form of an extended conversation over text between the main character and a mystery presence. It’s never explained whether this presence is haunting her or helping her, if it’s a ghost or a person or a figment of her own imagination. I half-heartedly entertained a theory that it was the boyfriend of the woman she worked for her screwing with her, which would make enough sense to be plausible, but not enough to provide the movie with any sense of resolution. Basically I have no idea what Assayas is trying to say, or what any of this means. I don’t know if I’m supposed to. It doesn’t matter. This movie is creepy as hell, and incredibly, superlatively good. 

Lady MacBeth - William Oldroyd

This movie is called Lady MacBeth because it’s essentially a retelling of MacBeth, if his wife had been more willing to get her hands dirty. It looks and feels like a period drama about a marriage arranged between families for financial reasons and a resulting affair of passion, but it never actually is that. From minute one it’s pitched at such a tense, bizarre level, that when Mrs. MacBeth switches from a sympathetic if inscrutable kept woman to a full out psycho, it’s not all that unexpected or surprising. It’s still heavy though, because MacBeth is a heavy play. And this movie absolutely lives up to that ambition.

The Florida Project - Sean Baker

Sean Baker’s last movie was about two black transgendered prostitutes in LA--a demographic that to my knowledge has never been the focus of a movie before--and rather than ask his audience to pity them he just told a story about them. It worked so well for me because it never felt like he was trying to please the cultural moment. He just realized this was an underreported American vibrancy. Here he takes a slightly different approach. Everyone and their mother has taken a stab at American poverty, but Baker manages to tell a story about adults living in harrowing conditions from the point of view of children who don’t realize their situation is difficult and so don’t feel any difficulty. Actually, now that I think about it, they are pretty similar. Both movies are about how daily life can keep the sadness about one’s condition at bay. For the prostitutes in Southern California, it’s whatever workaday stuff they have to deal with at any given moment. For the left behind margin-dwellers in this movie, it’s either children or childhood.

The Beguiled - Sofia Coppola

90 minutes on female horniness and the color white. Who says no?

Beatriz at Dinner - Miguel Arteta

You’ll forgive me for thinking this was going to be the cringe comedy it was billed as, with a Trumpian bent as a casually racist rich old guy makes increasingly inappropriate comments to an unexpected Mexican houseguest. But in retrospect, doing that would have put the onus on the Mexican to be uncomfortable, and that’s not what this movie wants to do at all. Instead she spends the whole night making everyone else deeply, cringingly uncomfortable. Which makes this movie much more interesting than the one it was billed as. 

Gerald’s Game - Mike Flanagan

I’m going to reiterate an earlier point, which is that for a basic bang for your buck, it’s hard to do better than well made low budget horror flicks. Get Out may win the best picture Oscar, but at it’s heart it’s really just a best case scenario for what these movies can be--fast, fun, small, structured around really good ideas. They’re the best playgrounds for smart filmmakers. Gerald’s Game includes a scene near the end in which a woman rips the skin off her entire hand--a scene that stressed me out more than my first first date--but ignoring that I could easily watch it 600 more times. The most watchable movie since, well, Get Out.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. - Dan Gilroy

Here’s a not terribly controversial opinion: Denzel Washington is the greatest movie star of all time. Who’s better? Jack Nicholson maybe? Cary Grant? His total comfort in front of the camera, his powerhouse intensity, his towering presence, the way words roll out of his mouth like a waterfall from the fountain of youth. He’s been doing this shit now for four decades, and none of his movies are less than good. He is the king. I mostly loved this movie. Completely ignored by a general audience, I thought the trailer looked great and was disappointed it was removed from theaters before I could see it. For the first hour it’s rather near perfect. Denzel Washington talks and talks, citing legal statutes, expressing disdain for the obviously fucked up legal system, stuttering through social situations he never bothered to learn how to navigate. He’s confident but not comfortable. The second half goes off the rails. It’s the kind of mess you want to blame a studio for, or an angry producer who was annoyed there weren’t more car chases. But maybe Gilroy--who’s Nightcrawler was a more coherent movie--just lost the plot somewhere along the way. No real matter. More legal dramas should be this sharp and this fun. And one must hail the king.

Mudbound - Dee Rees

For the first 45 minutes this movie has an As I Lay Dying quality, where multiple narrators lay out the state of their moral and historical situations in portentous southern language that always sounds profound when done well, like it is here. It never gets quite that deep again, but it becomes a sober and accurate look at what this country, particularly the south, would have been for blacks, women, and even white men in the 1940s. Halfway through I started to wonder if any movie had ever shown how plain old fashioned American racism strips away the dignity of blacks and the humanity of whites as well as this one does. 12 Years a Slave, maybe, but even that one cheated a little bit by being a horror show. Also, Rob Morgan, who plays the paterfamilias of the black tenant farming family, especially finds the Faulkner in his character’s position. For my money he’s the breakout star here. 

Icarus - Bryan Fogel

A problem I have found with certain documentaries that rely on their primary sources to tell their story is that the narrative can get blurry. This is a movie that would benefit from a narrator just to keep an eye on the spine of this fascinating true life event. The premise seems to be that a filmmaker stumbled completely by accident onto something so interesting that it obviously needed to take over his movie. Maybe a better filmmaker would have stepped back and asked some of the bigger questions presented by this narrative, like, why did this scientist seem compelled to run Putin’s national doping program? Maybe a master filmmaker would have dug into the heart of a man like Vladimir Putin who felt compelled to orchestrate a national doping program, a true story of global deception and malevolent corruption that deserves dozens of movies. But you’d have to be a walrus to not be intrigued by this guy, or eternally grateful that someone with a camera managed to catch him as his crime was discovered by the IOC and his government threw him under the bus and forced him into witness protection.

The Discovery - Charlie McDowell

I’ll get this out of the way first: the twist is not good. A squander of a pretty great concept that they could have anything with. But the rest of the movie is. The concept really is neat, and the whole thing looks great. This is a small, self-contained movie that chugs along at a heady pace. It’s a perfect Netflix movie, a genre I suspect we will all learn to recognize pretty soon.

Wonderstruck - Todd Haynes

I’m Not There is a profoundly silly movie, but Carol was made by a consummate pro, so I’m inclined to like Todd Haynes, and trust him when he experiments by, say, making a silent movie that intersplices stories from two generations and shoots them to look contemporaneous to movies of their respective eras. Like The Shape of Water, there must be a wavelength that really gets this movie. Maybe one day I’ll give it another shot, but fuck it’s slow.

Good Time - Ben and Josh Safdie

Woah. Let’s see here: This is a grim, ugly, unpretty neon movie about a side of New York that most people don’t like thinking about and will generally choose to ignore. It’s not just the poverty--there’s a darkness here, an ugliness and a savageness that’s usually examined sociologically if it’s examined at all. But this movie lives in it like it grew up in it, which for all I know it did. It’s about a white guy--and his skin color is very relevant--careening through Queens, ruining lives along the way in a single-minded quest to raise enough money to make his autistic brother’s bail. Mostly it’s so exciting and unpredictable that it flies by, telling a story about a guy with the survival skills of a cockroach getting through a night we might describe as eventful. And I need to give special mention to Jennifer Jason Leigh. She’s only in one scene, but she takes it to a dark, viscerally disturbing place. I don’t know that much about her as an actor, I don’t know what kind of work she usually does, but in a movie populated by characters I sincerely wish could have better lives, she will stand out in my mind for awhile. 

Song to Song - Terrence Malick

Part of me wants to like this movie, or at least respect it. Every shot is interesting--in fact that might be most of the point: every scene takes place in a visually arresting location, the actors do odd things with their bodies, the camera shoots them from weird angles. And I admire that Malick has mastered an impressionism that is uniquely his. But I also suspect that maybe this is just a bunch of bullshit from a guy who’s talented enough to make decently interesting work without trying very hard. I mean, he used to take 20 years to make his movies, now he’s pumping out one after another like he’s Woody Allen. And I think a movie can only have so much emotional resonance when the average scene lasts about 5 seconds. I don’t know, I can sort of see why a person might like this sort of thing, if a person was so inclined, but man did I think it was boring. If he’s just gonna make ponderous nonsense now, then at least The Tree of Life had the decency to be about the meaning of the universe. 

Hostiles - Scott Cooper

This is first and foremost a really solid western. Stoic and sharp and very well made. Christian Bale is amazing at this and should do one of these every couple of years. My only complaint is that it could have been better. It could have been a masterpiece. But it points to ideas about the inhospitality of the American frontier that it never really manages to show. People knocked the Revenant, but that movie really slaps you on the ass with how tough it was to hang in the old west. Hostiles wanted to do the same thing, but it settles instead on the simpler thesis that we stole this land from it’s rightful inhabitants. Which, I mean, fair enough I guess.  

Molly’s Game - Aaron Sorkin

If Aaron Sorkin wants to write a novel and release it as an audiobook narrated by Jessica Chastain, guess what, I’ll listen, but he is not a director. This is a movie where the voice-over will voice over dialogue because good lord does he love to write, and a movie where the main character at her lowest point will narrate her depression over a shot of her in bed, because good lord does he not know how to show. So this movie loses something his screenplays don’t when they’re filmed by top shelf talents like David Fincher or Danny Boyle. But Sorkin is one of my favorite guys to write about because he’s so talented and also so flawed. He’s in love with academia, and with knowing things. I can’t imagine what he’s like to shoot the shit with, but I assume that the person he wants to be is the person he keeps writing--the hyper-literate Renaissance man (and now woman) with a top 99 percentile intellect and some kind of pathological drive. Lots of movies are about everymen, but neither you nor I will ever be a Sorkin protagonist. His doormen are wittier and better educated than we are. Anyway, his biggest flaw in my opinion, besides a tendency to get high on his own supply, which we might as well call a feature in this case, is his tipsy uncle sentimentality. But other than a scene at the end between Molly and her father, which is a cinematic crime against humanity, this movie mostly avoids that. It’s too busy being his most fun movie yet. Even more than Steve Jobs, which is where I learned to tear down my cynical walls and lean into his brand of goofy pop intellectualism. Here’s my take on this one: it will not stand up to repeat viewings. At all. Like, at all. But it made me want to get a job in finance just so I can start going to high stakes poker tournaments.

Kong: Skull Island - Jordan Vogt-Roberts

2017 was such a good year for movies that even bullshit like this was great. This movie pulls ideas whole cloth from the last Godzilla movie--here there’s also a benevolent monster god, a showdown between giant creatures over the soul of man, and almost contemptuously fantastic cinematography (because if something this corporate can look this good, than how much should we even value high priced photography?)--but it takes itself a fraction as seriously as that one did, and is by legions less stupid.

Call Me By Your Name - Luca Guadagnino

More movies should have stakes this low. There’s a lazy confidence here that I like a lot. This is how a movie about a 17 year old boy’s summer should feel. Nothing really matters, and every day is pretty good. Over the course of two hours he will swim, smoke, read, and fuck a boy, a girl, and a peach. He’ll grow up to become a gay man with a pretty normal and hopefully happy life. He’ll remember this summer very fondly.

Win It All - Joe Swanberg

If every movie were like this, movies would be a lot more boring. But I suppose there is a space out there for simple stories told simply. The best scenes are the ones with Keegan-Michael Key, who is so charismatic that he risks derailing the utter unexceptionalness that is this movie’s point.

A Ghost Story - David Lowery

Does it seem gimmicky to make a movie about a dead husband as a guy in a white sheet with two eye holes cut out out like a child’s Halloween costume? I don’t know, the effect in practice to me was to make this celestial being look lonely and sad. He hangs his head in a silent longing and watches time hurdle through space from a fixed point he either can’t or won’t leave. This is a quiet, still movie; the kind that doesn’t cost much and is probably over-represented at film festivals. But it is, and forgive the sincerity here, devastatingly beautiful.

Phantom Thread - Paul Thomas Anderson

I wanted to give this a few more days to sink in before I wrote about it, but I’m nothing if not a content provider, so here we go. As the greatest artist of a generation ought to do, PTA upended my expectations about his style with this one, creating something new and challenging and not beholden to his previous work. His last couple movies have been about tension and release. This one really isn’t. Instead it’s a love story, or actually I mean it’s a relationship story, about the hunt for connection that all relationships become after the initial euphoria wears off. It’s still a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so it’s haunting and strange and made up of tense dialogue that obfuscates it’s artistic intentions, spoken by strange people with unclear motivation. But it’s also funny, and mostly straightforward. It’s centered around a relationship, but this movie is as impossible to reduce as the last one, or the one before that. There are limits to my partisanship--there’s a dandyism to this movie that I don’t like at all, but this guy is consistently setting his sights up past the rafters, and throwing walk off touchdowns every single time.

I Love You, Daddy - Louis CK

Louis CK’s disgrace is the only one I’ve had trouble reckoning with, because he’s the only person so far to go down who really had more to say. Unfortunately, if this ends up being his last project, it’ll have been a disappointing note to end on. Louis’ artistic problem is that he’s too hard on himself. Very often he will set up a disagreement between himself and another character and have the other character essentially school him, even if he’s not wrong. He has a tendency to shortchange his own point of view. But it’s never been detrimental to his work until now. This movie is essentially a professionally successful version of the pathetically passive guy Louis always plays getting chastised by a series of articulate women. The writing is very often great--he’ll probably never get his due now, but he’s the best writer of dialogue since Woody Allen--and it’s a little sunnier than his usual point of view allows for, but it’s less focused and less interesting than either of his two TV shows. 

The Post - Steven Spielberg

Like Bridge of Spies, this is a minor work from the master. The only bad thing I can say about this movie is that he’s not doing anything new, and the subject matter invites comparisons to more interesting movies, like Spotlight, and All the President’s Men, which would make a hell of a second billing here as a diptych about the rise of the Washington Post. Unlike Clint Eastwood, I believe Spielberg still has extra gears. He still has a few more home runs in him. But like Eastwood even his most workmanlike products are made with a level of casual mastery that makes them perennial top tenners. I don’t know that this movie was made for any reason other than to express a distaste for the current occupant of the White House. It still earned Meryl Streep another Oscar nomination. 

It Comes at Night - Trey Edward Shults

Why are all these low budget horror indies so good? 

The House - Andrew Jay Cohen

Will Ferrell movies have reached this weird place now where the concepts are funny but their executions aren’t. They’re coming up with good ideas but filming them straight because at this point they’re businessmen with schedules to keep. There’s none of the peripheral lawlessness that made up his earlier work, or makes up really any good comedy, especially in the Apatow era. This movie is only worth watching for two reasons: 1. it will pump you up if your on the way to the casino, and 2. evil Amy Poehler is so much better than civic do-gooder Amy Poehler.

Snatched - Jonathan Levine

Is Amy Schumer the first comedian since Jerry Seinfeld who’s funnier in their scripted work than they are in their stand up? Anyway, until she starts phoning it in like elder statesman Will Ferrell, or is supplanted by someone newer, she’s my comedy protagonist of choice. Why did people take on a pass on this? Cuz the plotting is lazy? When isn’t it in a comedy?

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House - Peter Landesman

This movie is a huge mess but I refuse to not like it. It’s murky, paranoid, serious; in other words a great spy movie, about institutions of American government that dislike, distrust, and actively work to undermine one another. Nixon is barely even mentioned until the end, and the Washington Post is barely mentioned at all. But this should have been a miniseries or a novel. It’s a ten hour story condensed into two, and thus makes even less sense than a good spy movie ought to.

The Dark Tower - Nikolaj Arcel

As someone who has not read the books and wasn’t even aware there was a cult behind them, I can say this is a perfectly enjoyable plane watch.

Battle of the Sexes - Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

I suppose this is the safe and logical choice for the recent Oscar winner, and it’s not a bad movie by any stretch. The actual battle scene at the end is quite excellent. But ignoring the current political environment, a movie where a tennis prodigy discovers her sexuality and takes on a boy’s club is much less interesting to me than a movie about a hustler who’s past his prime, gambling with his buddies and turning himself into a heel. Steve Carrell plays it as a good natured ode to a dopey strand of American hustle. He’s the best thing in this. But of course that’s not why this movie got made. I guess I’m ultimately just a member of the boy’s club. 

American Made - Doug Liman

Speaking of American Hustle, this Goodfellas in planes strikes me as more Hustle with drugs, inasmuch as the ostensible good guys, the feds, are really just a bunch of selfish ambitious cowboys playing with house money. Where Bradley Cooper’s FBI agent was too stupid to realize how bad he was at his job, American Made’s Domhnall Gleason, who I understand is now in every movie, is some kind of CIA stud with no accountability and no budgetary restraints, coming up with increasingly outlandish ideas for which there are no consequences at all. When Tom Cruise starts working with Colombian drug cartels, the implication seems to be that everybody knows and nobody really cares. I’m not sure this movie makes any sense at all, or if it’s supposed to. It’s buoyed by movie star Tom Cruise at his movie star best, bringing a slight, slight maturity to his Top Gun self.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Rian Johnson

In The Force Awakens Adam Driver was the only good part of a bad movie. Now he’s the best part of a great movie. 

The Lost City of Z - James Gray

The epic as a genre seems to me inherently flawed; who wants a movie that goes on too long and changes tone 7 times? This is an interesting one: it's first foray down the river comes with Apocalypse Now ambitions that it holds its own next to. The second trip is fun and captivating. The third trip, after extended scenes of World War One and, I don’t know, some family stuff, is too little too late. Basically, when this movie is in the jungle, it’s great. When it’s not, it’s not.

Lady Bird - Greta Gerwig

Let me stand apart from the glut of people my age who thought this movie was made specifically for them, and say that this movie was made specifically not for me. I can’t think of anything I want to see less than a coming of age tale called Lady Bird about a high school senior who decides to call herself “Lady Bird.” But the thing about good movies is that they transcend premise. Greta Gerwig isn’t dogmatically sticking to genre here--the dialogue is sharper than the average movie about an idiosyncratic high school senior, the parents and their financial situation occupy a more central role, and when the protagonist briefly tries to fit in with the cool kids, she kinda pulls it off--but really she’s just made a better coming of age movie than most people who try ever do. This is what we all would like to turn our childhood memories into. And for those concerned, like I was, by a trailer full of precious dialogue, the movie is so snappily edited that lines that would read as self-indulgent or treacly come out down and dirty in practice.

The Disaster Artist - James Franco

One of the impressive things about this movie is that it’s a comedy that doesn’t come at the expense of it’s subject: a man who in a slurred Slavic accent tells a room full of theater students “I’m not villain, you are villain!” A man who in other words could have an entire Office-style show built around him by a less charitable filmmaker. But James Franco is here to celebrate this bad movie, and honor the weirdo who made it. This isn’t the direction I would have gone in: I’d be too curious about the why and the who. But Franco does a really good job with his material. This is a really good and funny movie, with a murderer’s row of supporting actors who should all be doing stuff like this rather than whatever the fuck Seth Rogen is working on right now. Franco paints Tommy Wiseau as a pretty damaged guy with boundless ambition and absolutely no understanding of how human beings behave or how to interact with them--at one point he talks about wanting to run his own planet--but he keeps it light. Our man Tommy gets a standing ovation at the end, which I don’t believe really happened, but in this context I support.

I, Tonya - Craig Gillespie

One thing about Tonya Harding is that if she were coming up now, in the era of Lavar Ball and Jezebel, she’d be uncontroversially loved, and never would have had to club anyone in the kneecap. As far as I’m concerned she’s owed a revisit, which this movie gives her, and makes her look sympathetic and talented and fundamentally decent, if a little unwilling to take responsibility for anything at all. Anyway it’s a pretty damn good movie. Not quite as wild as it’s masterpiece of a trailer suggests, but pretty fun and breezy the whole way through.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - Jake Kasdan

Nowadays, most theaters will let you bring alcohol into the screening. So here’s a fun game: go see comedies you have no interest in, and drink steadily throughout them. Preferably with others. I’m not being a dick here, I found this experience highly enjoyable.

The Shape of Water - Guillermo del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth has earned Guillermo a ton of goodwill. And I mean, I caught part of Hellboy 2 on HBO the other night and that is a flick. This may be his next one-for-me, but it’s not Pan’s Cold War. The genius of his earlier masterpiece was that the descent into nightmare of its real life surroundings was mirrored by the descent into nightmare of its fairy tale. This is a pretty simple love story between a mute woman and a fish man, set during the Cold War. It’s a ripe premise and a ripe backdrop that Guillermo weirdly squanders. Any movie that casts as its villain Michael Shannon, the strangest and most intense man alive, and then makes him just another square 1950s Keepin’ up with the Joneses asshole, isn’t going to stand up to Pan’s Labyrinth. This movie is a love story between a mute woman and a fish man. It should be a whole lot weirder, is my point.

Logan - James Mangold

What this movie gets so right is rather than make super hero movies that could conceivably take place in our world, directors should make super hero movies that would take place if they were the real world. Hence the cursing, the ultraviolence, and the theme of consequence which hangs over Logan like a lampshade. Watching Wolverine and Professor X say “fuck” and brutally murder government agents feels like removing the sanitizing goggles that the older movies were shot through and seeing them for the first time as they really are. These are two badly broken people keeping each other alive. It’s also by happy accident a movie for the era of Trump, where a shitty present has the bad guys in the driver’s seat and forces everyone in the margins back into hiding. Patrick Stewart brings warmth and realism to a new version of an old role. This is the best super hero movie ever made.

Darkest Hour - Joe Wright

So Gary Oldman’s definitely going to win the Oscar here, right? It’s fine, he deserves it. I could have used more about who Winston Churchill was, why he was such an eccentric alcoholic, but as a portrait of a great man working through his defining moment this is a great movie. Between this and Lincoln I hope every new biopic is about the defining moment of a great person’s life. So much more interesting than biopics about great people.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri - Martin McDonagh

At first I thought he was just making fun of American hillbillies. But if this isn’t his best movie, it’s definitely his deepest. Like a darker redneck Batman it’s main character lets a justified anger turn her into kind of a monster, and maybe gets redeemed at the end. It’s funny and entirely surprising. Sam Rockwell should get nominated.

The Big Sick - Michael Showalter

A movie about two saintly parents dealing with not only their comatose daughter, but an overgrown forty-year old child who’s rude to them yet refuses to leave them alone, and never has to face his own pathetic shortcomings because sometimes people are racist to him. Fuck this piece of shit movie.

Thor: Ragnarock - Taikki Waititi

Chris Hemsworth seems cool. 

Last Flag Flying - Richard Linklater

Eh. I’m much less of a Linklater partisan than most, but this movie actually wasn’t that well received. It’s not bad, it just kinda meanders, and I actually don’t think Bryan Cranston or Steve Carrell are particularly good actors. It’s anger is righteous though, and Lawrence Fishburn is a titan.

Blade Runner 2049 - Denis Villeneuve

This one slows down a little once the plot kicks in, but holy god does it look good. A worthy heir to the original.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos

I think I figured it out--this guy likes to set up insane premises, force his characters to speak so flatly that it seems absurd, and then lift the gate and see how the ball rolls down the hill. Every character in this movie acts calm and rational and mostly human in the face of something so bizarre and terrifying as to defy logic. I like The Lobster more because I suspect it had more to say, but this one keeps you on a knife’s edge and forces you to prepare yourself for anything.

Wind River - Taylor Sheridan

This is the third screenplay and first directorial effort from the guy who wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water, two of the best movies of the past few years. This is his worst movie. I suspect the culprit is novice direction. Despite this having a 501(c)4 title card at the end, for the first time I’m not sure what the point is or what he was trying to say. But I hold this guy to a high standard, it’s still pretty damn good. It looks great and the story’s good. 

The Foreigner - Martin Campbell

This is a movie about Jackie Chan--still kicking ass in his 60s--avenging his dead daughter by boobytrapping a woods outside of a mansion, and another movie about a radical Irish politician and his cronies agitating for Irish independence, possibly through terrorism. Both of these movies should be awesome, although only one of them is. I don’t want to spoil by giving away the answer, but you can probably guess.

Marshall - Reginald Hudlin

A pretty simple courthouse movie about the future Supreme Court Justice when he was just a lawyer who apparently never spent a day in his life being intimidated by racism or the second smartest guy in the room. Sure, why not?

The Babysitter - McG

The second best horror/comedy of the year. My man McG is still killin’ it.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) - Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach is a guy who likes a lot of stuff I don’t, but he’s enough of an adult here to write adults who don’t seem trapped in the imagination of a guy who hasn’t grown up yet. This is a really entertaining movie. Adam Sandler is very good.

It - Andres Muschietti

I’m a little surprised this didn’t take more flack for being the R-rated Stranger Things. This is also about a group of oddball friends dealing with something weird and scary in that sleepy town called 80′s Nostalgia. It even has one of the same damn actors. But maybe it didn’t take more heat for the simple reason that it’s really good. It might not hold up on repeated viewings the same way Stranger Things really doesn’t, but it’s the best horror/comedy of the year.

mother! - Darren Aronofsky

The more I think about it, the more I like it. I went back and watched some of his other movies, and concluded that Black Swan might be his masterpiece by default, but he’s never made something I really loved. He still hasn’t, but this might be his best movie yet. It’s about Adam and Eve, and it’s about mother earth, and it’s about a self-absorbed artist wrenching everything he can out of his muse. But it seems like Aronofsky is having fun screwing around with all these concepts rather than somehow trying to tie them all together or say something profound about any one of them. Which makes the movie a lot more fun than it’s reputation suggests. In any case, my immediate take walking out of the theater was that it more than anything was about some poor guy who gave up everything he had just to write a damn poem.

Logan Lucky - Steven Soderbergh

This one didn’t do nearly as well as I thought it would, which might have more to do with its distribution model than anything else. Ocean’s 11 for hillbillies couldn’t be more accurate, but it’s not criticism. At least not coming from me. First of all, Ocean’s 11 is like the perfect movie. Second of all, I mostly love redneck culture. Adam Driver has an amazing ability to land roles that shortchange him and make great work out of them anyway. And every real man knows Channing Tatum is a better star than George Clooney.

Dunkirk - Christopher Nolan

Chris Nolan isn’t any good at telling stories, and anyway doesn’t seem to like doing it, so it’s no mystery why his best movie bags the plot completely. Even with it’s time looping gimmick premise this movie takes place entirely in real time, in the present, which is, it turns out, by far the best way to shoot a war movie. It’s hard to imagine something better coming out this year.

Baby Driver - Edgar Wright

The best music video ever made. Pour one out for Kevin Spacey.

Wonder Woman - Patty Jenkins

I resist these pieces of shit like Roy Moore resists girls who can buy their own alcohol, but every year I end up seeing one or two. This is probably the best case scenario for a DC comic book movie in 2017. Gal Gadot is a very pretty lady. This coulda been a good WWI movie.

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer - Joseph Cedar

Richard Gere plays a possibly homeless and mostly benevolent conman who befriends an Israeli bureaucrat and sees his fortune briefly change when said bureaucrat stumbles into the Prime Minister position. I walked into this one completely blind because it was March and I wanted to see a movie. I might be the only person outside of Israel who’s ever seen it. Which is unfortunate, because it’s better than a movie dumped out in March has any right to be. Kinda funny and kinda sad. Kinda satirical and very warm.

Get Out - Jordan Peele

Of course it’s a little overrated at this point. How could it not be? But the first hour of Jordan Peele’s cultural explosion is perfect--a breakdown of every awkward moment between black people and--let’s be honest--all white people. The second half is less deep and a little less fun: it’s when the social commentary flick turns into a genre film. But it’s a damn good genre film. Deservedly on everyone’s top ten list.

A Cure For Wellness - Gore Verbinski

I caught this one of the strength of it’s trailer and thought it was excellent, a creepy kind of horror movie that not enough people saw, about a health clinic that either prolongs or sucks the life out of rich retirees. Kind of a Shutter Island for a crowd less inclined to have its mind fucked.