#tom swale

[wipbigbang]

WIP BIG BANG SIGN-UPS ARE LIVE!

The 2024 round of WIP Big Bang is now open for sign-ups! Any fandom is welcome, as long as the fic is 500 completed so far and will be at least 7,500 words upon its finishing. Signing up is easy: just fill out the form linked below after you read the FAQ and take a look at the schedule.

[90smovies]

[hullemmfer]

Beginnings of the Oath

Fandom: Young Wizards Characters: Tom Swale, Carl Romeo Tags: Pre-Canon/Prequel, Pre-Relationship Complete (Chapters 1/1)

A short look at Tom and Carl's early years.

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[roseshavethoughts]

Summerland (2020)

Summerland (2020) #Review

Synopsis- A reclusive writer is saddled with the responsibility of a young boy in a war-torn nation. Although reluctant at first, accepting him allows her to rediscover not only joy but also a long-lost love. Director- Jessica Swale Starring- Gemma Arterton, Gugu Mbatga-Raw, Lucas Bond Genre- Romance | War | LGBT Released- 2020 ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Clocking in at just over two hours…

[theholmwoodfoundation]

Welcome to the Holmwood Foundation

Sanguis Vita Est

The Holmwood Foundation is a Found Footage Horror-Fiction Podcast created by Fio Trethewey @fiotrethewey (Big Finish: Gallifrey War Room, 18th Wall Productions) and Georgia Cook @georgiacooked (Big Finish: The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles, Gallifrey War Room, BBC Books, The Dracula Daily Sketch Collection). It is a modern day sequel to the gothic novel Dracula. 

What is the Holmwood Foundation about?

Our story follows Jeremy Larkin (Played by Sean Carlsen) and Maddie Townsend (Played by Rebecca Root), two co-workers at the mysterious Holmwood Foundation, as they are possessed by the ghosts of Jonathan and Mina Harker, and embark on a road trip across the country in an effort to achieve their ghost's wishes: to stop Dracula once and for all. This is a story about identity and self discovery, family loyalty and devotion, all wrapped around a nightmare of a road trip with a rejuvenating severed head, incredibly sincere Victorian ghosts, and an analogue recorder. (Content Warnings for blood, horror themes and possession)

Where can we listen to The Holmwood Foundation?

Find our pilot episode on Acast, here:

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, we are currently working hard on season one, which we hope to drop bi-weekly in Spring/early Summer 2025. Follow along for further updates as production progresses!

Who are the Cast and Crew?

In our pilot episode: Across the Moors, we have:

Rebecca Root as Maddie Townsend and Mina Harker, and Sean Carlsen as Jeremy Larkin and Jonathan Harker.

Other voice talents include:

Samuel Clemens as Arthur Jones Becky Wright as Thrall & Phone Voice Jessica Carroll as Newsreader Luke Kondor as Robert Swales and featuring Attila Puskas as Dracula

Joining our crew we have Samuel Clemens as Director, Katharine Armitage as our Script Editor and Benji Clifford as our Sound Engineer and Designer

In Season one, we will also be joined by:

Basil Waite as Tom Van Helsing Michelle Kelly as Henri Martin Andrew Biss as Jonathan Harker 3rd Jackie Calistaah as Elena David Ault as Dr Timothy Lake Candace Marie as Magdalena Swift Robyn Holdaway as Cam Karim Kronfli as Dave

Extra Content:

Between now and season one's release, we will slowly be sharing small pieces of related content related to the Holmwood Foundation. These might be emails, or obituaries, maybe even interviews. Follow the links below to find all of that content together:

Extract List - Updated as of 15/11/24

Tags: Frequently Asked Questions Production Updates OOC Answered Asks Extracts Foundation Emails Holmwood Foundation Art

Social Media Links here: https://linktr.ee/theholmwoodfoundation

[movies-to-add-to-your-tbw]

Title: Leading Lady Parts

Rating: NR

Director: Jessica Swale

Cast: Catherine Tate, Anthony Welsh, Gemma Arterton, Gemma Chan, Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Felicity Jones, Katie Leung, Stacy Martin, Wunmi Mosaku, Florence Pugh, Tom Hiddleston

Release year: 2018

Genres: comedy

Blurb: The best women of British acting go to an audition for a dream role, primed to take on the role of a lifetime: that complex woman, the strong woman, a woman for today.

[dduane]

So let me reblog this, as it's probably the simplest way to keep the thread in order.

Per the earlier post linked to below: as of this writing (and for the immediately-foreseeable future) it remains a complicated thing to pull together a full set of the Young Wizards books for library purposes, as there's never been a unified hardcover set of the whole series at once. The linked post gets into the whys and wherefores, mostly having to do with internal ructions at publishing houses.

The SYWTBAW covers vary wildly in art and execution as the years go by and cover styles change, and it's interesting to trace the changes.

The one you've got is indeed the first edition of SYWTBAW, the Delacorte hardcover, which is increasingly hard to find (though not insanely overpriced). The art's an early work by the Newbery-award winning artist and writer David Wiesner.

I remember Tom Swale—then one of my story editors at Hanna-Barbera, now Advisory/Senior wizard for the ages—indicating the peryton who's apparently reaching toward Kit's antenna-wand, and saying, "That guy needs his own Saturday morning series." Not sure I'd disagree. :)

The SYWTBAW cover you'd have seen in your young day, though, was the Dell Yearling (trade-ish size) or Dell Laurel-Leaf (mass market) paperback with art by Neal McPheeters. I have kind of a soft spot fo this one: i like the artist's work.

Then, after Dell dumped me and a bunch of other new and/or midlist authors (I mean, come on, what sensible person throws Jane Yolen out the corporate window??), there were no new SYW... editions in the US until the Harcourt paperback (and also a rare small format hardcover) with David Bowers art that appeared above.

The SYW... cover following that one was the same one we've got now on the Harcourt mass market paperbacks. Its art's by Cliff Nielsen, who's done all ten of the Harcourt covers, up to and through Games Wizards Play.

And a while after that, after the series's sales really started to pick up, came the 20th Anniversary edition. It had wraparound art from Greg Swearingen, who'd been doing the covers for the "digest format" editions of the early books in the series (this format being targeted toward younger readers). Such a lovely piece of work.

...Anyway, that's where we stand on North American SYW... covers at the moment. The one on the paperback SYW... that uses the New Millennium Edition text is unavailable in the US, Canada or the Philippines due to contractual issues.

(sits back, shaking head as usual at all those covers...)

Anyway: let me take a moment here to let people know who might have been looking for one of the earlier editions, for sentimental or other reasons, that we've got a fair number of them at Signed Books Direct. I'm in the middle of an inventory at the moment, so—to avoid any disappointment about actual availability—if you're interested in anything, rather than just ordering something, the best way to go is to drop a query to the store's email address and let us know what you're looking for. I'll get you sorted out.

Anyway: gotta stop here and go see if the rye bread in the kitchen has risen enough to bake... :)

School librarian here, just stopping in to share a story... Someone recently donated a scattered handful of your Young Wizards books to our library. I devoured them as a child and was excited to share them with my students, so I dug up copies of the ones we were missing, up through book 8. I got them out onto the shelf last week. On Friday, one of my middle schoolers came in asking for recs. I suggested the first book. He wasn't sure about it, but he trusted me enough to at least try it. He said it looked weird, though, and grabbed another random book just in case.

Monday morning, he was the first student in at my desk, and he checked out the next two in the series! He's hooked!

It gets no better than that. :)

...I have to wonder about the cover on the one that "looked weird", though. Certainly there are some of the SYWTBAW covers that've struck me as a little weird, over time. In particular, I was never quite sure what was going on in the art director's mind with the ones Harcourt commissioned from David Bowers...

Meanwhile, I've got plenty of copies of book 9, so if you want to DM me, I'll send one your way. :)

[displayheartcode]

inspired by that post of tom and carl at the beach. 

[katieannwrites]

Young Wizards fans will get this...

I’ve decided that this is Tom and Carl.

[90smovies]

Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

[guillermodelacross]

I, for one, adore my gay wizard uncles

[ryanccoleman]

"Summerland”: Review

“There is a place for escapism with an ethical backbone. More than ever, we need to be able to relax under the spell of fantasists we can trust not to poison us with irony or distort history to suit their ideology.“

Summerland is British dramatist and theater director Jessica Swale’s film directorial debut. It tells the story of Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton), a misanthropic young folklorist who is forced to care for a child evacuated from London in advance of the Nazi blitz. The film opens and closes on the great Dame Penelope Wilton as older Alice in the 1970s, and flashes of the character’s memories of being an Oxford girl in the ‘20s run through the middle, but Summerland is primarily a sort of wartime conversion narrative. Alice’s nature, scarred over by love lost and gone bitter, is gradually healed by the slow emergence of maternal love for the bright-eyed and innocent child, Frank, played with preternatural nuance by newcomer Lucas Bond.

When Frank is dropped at the doorstep of Alice’s romantically isolated cliffside cottage on the outskirts of a town in East Sussex, he finds her in a bitter and recalcitrant state. For their first dinner she hands him an uncooked potato, raw ham, and a whole egg. “You don’t expect me to cook it for you? There’s the stove,” she points, and walks back to her life’s great pursuit—her writing. She spends her days laced into a rigid routine of researching and composing “academic theses, not stories,” as she corrects a prying town elder (Tom Courtenay), that use science to debunk narrative folkloric explanations for strange natural phenomena.

Her life is solitary, studious, and mercilessly subjected to the strictest self-imposed routine. The war’s sudden imposition, via Frank, on that routine brings with it other, more upbraiding interruptions. His inadvertent puncturing of the hermetic seal on her life stirs up vivid flashbacks of a time when she was, like him, looking toward the future with innocent hope. In that time, her twenties in the ‘20s, she met Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Vera at a spring concert at Oxford. The spark was immediate, the chemistry undeniable. So began the hushed and rapturous affair whose sudden break has cast a long, withering shadow over Alice’s life. It is out from under this burden that Frank’s childlike curiosity and unquestioning faith in the goodness of other people begins to pull Alice.

Alice’s emotional flowering begins to dovetail with the subject of her latest inquiry—the Summerland myth. In the film, what Alice calls Summerland is actually Fata Morgana, or centuries-old mariner’s yarns of floating islands materializing inexplicably on the horizon, thought of as conjurings of the wicked sorceress of Arthurian lore, Morgan Le Fay. In reality, Summerland is a term created by theosophists in the 19th century to refer to a concept similar to heaven in ancient pagan cosmologies. Swale has simply nested the one within the visual of the other. Called variously The Otherworld, The Shining Land, and the Land of the Young by Celts, Summerland is “a land of eternal summer, with grassy fields and sweet flowing rivers,” like “Earth before the advent of humans,” writes popular witchsplainer Scott Cunningham. He could well be describing the pastoral, soft and sunlit setting of Swale’s film—the southeast English coast, shot gloriously on location.

If it’s possible to resist Summerland’s principal hook, namely, Swale’s ability to tell an intricately plotted, politically engaged, at times bleak story in a way that feels as sublime, escapist, and low stakes as the folklore its heroine is investigating, then the locations which provide backdrop for it all prove irresistible. It’s simply impossible to look at Gemma Arterton with no makeup on, hair free and flowing down her back, clad in a warm wardrobe of rustic, earth-toned skirts and cardigans, scrawling something about wildflowers in her leatherbound notebook, emblazoned against the operatic white chalk cliffs being continually washed by the sparkling sapphire sea and not feel instantly soothed, regardless of what else is going on, in her life or yours.

Landscape is then not just backdrop, it is central to the film’s most potent attribute—its palliative effect on the weary and discontented viewer’s soul. Cunningham’s evocation of Summerland, as an oasis suspended in time, above and parallel to the conflicted world, where all pain is temporarily abolished, extends beyond how the film looks to how it feels, landing at this particular moment.

Like the floating islands that give it its name, Summerland hovers above real life without ever quite touching down. In the moments the film’s dramatic conflicts threaten to break through the amniotic stasis of its sun-drenched cinematography, romantic thematic pursuits, and effervescent dialogue, Swale vanishes the stakes. Only one line is spoken about what would have been the multiply illicit nature of Arterton and Mbatha-Raw’s relationship, for instance. “They think we should burn in hell,” Alice has to explain to Frank, who in all his totemic, childlike innocence, has managed somehow to avoid homophobic social inculcation. Never mind the fact that their relationship, in addition to being same sex, was cross racial. What would it have been like for Vera, as a woman-loving Black woman, to navigate a white ethno-nationalist empire during a time when homosexuality (though lesbianism was never targeted explicitly in the laws) was punishable by exile, hard labor, and even imprisonment? We can only imagine, because that’s not Summerland’s game.

Summerland isn’t a dirge-like, finger-wagging history lesson like The Imitation Game. Nor is it bright, confectionary, period-set escapism like Autumn de Wilde’s recent adaptation of Emma. It’s somewhere in between, more akin to Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot, which embraces contemporary cultural politics without really getting into them. The result is a kind of guilt-free indulgence in classical Hollywood narrative constructs, made possible not by inverting or deconstructing them, but by simply updating who gets to negotiate their terms. This sounds like criticism but I for one am fully on board. Long Shot was one of my favorite movies of last year, and Summerland is one of my favorite movies this year so far. There is a place for escapism with an ethical backbone. More than ever, we need to be able to relax under the spell of fantasists we can trust not to poison us with irony or distort history to suit their ideology. Spoiler alert, but Summerland has a happy ending. Would you expect that from a period film with an interracial lesbian couple at its center? You wouldn’t, but wouldn’t you like to?

copyright © 2020 Ryan Christopher Coleman

[ozu-teapot]

Summerland | Jessica Swale | 2020

Gemma Arterton, Fergal McElherron, Tom Courtenay

[mrfahrenheit92]