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theliterateape · 2 years

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I, Substitute

by Don Hall

While temporarily hanging my hat in Kansas and helping my mom take care of my dad, I needed some kind of impetus to get me out of their house and perhaps make a few bucks to boot. I have an ancient teaching degree from back when they etched the degrees on slate so I thought “Hey! Let’s squeeze a bit more out of that now useless college expense and substitute teach here!”

Substitute teaching is a weird beast of a gig. You dress appropriately (in accordance to the standards of practice of the district), bring a water bottle, load up a few snacks, a laptop and your official badge. The badge serves as a way to alert other staff that you are legit and not necessarily a child predator roaming the halls and as a magnetic swipe card for either the outside doors, the sign in process, or both.

The office assigns you a room or series of rooms. You wander around the building for about ten minutes trying to find the first room, maybe ask another staff member for directions with some sort of small talk version of “I’m a fucking idiot but I’m all you got!” You find your room and survey where you can hang your jacket, put your water bottle, look for the lesson plans for the day, and marvel in horror at the role sheet filled with unpronounceable names that you will surely mangle at the emotional peril of the underdeveloped, doughy recipients of your stumbling inability to read names from Poland to Mexico to Dubai.

The bar for performance is remarkably low. The job description should read “Must be able to hand out papers, sit bored out of your skull, make sure the lunatics don’t take over the asylum with no authority, no hope for respect from the inmates, and no real idea if they are lying to you when they tell you that their regular class work involves smartphones and flaming hot covered salt lick snacks.”

I immediately recognize that, as opposed to the hardened criminal class of Chicago’s freshman students, these Kansas kids are more dully laconic and don’t even bother to take a beat to notice me or make eye contact. No intent to rebel, these folks are like people sitting on the train hoping you don’t sit down next to them and if they pretend to be on the phone you won’t try to speak. Imagine a blind date with thirty women who see you at the door and knew instantly this was not the date they hoped for.

I’m a sucker for a challenge so I wade in. The class for this maiden voyage is a Film Appreciation class (the drama teacher has quit the job a few weeks prior because of a poorly executed active shooter situation that left him to restart therapy and ultimately decide this was not working for him) so I leap right in with questions about what movies they like. Christ, I love movies and even have a movie podcast so I’m certain I can engage this room of stinky zombies.

Kung Fu Panda.

Among the students willing to hold their cement-filled heads above neckline, it seems the only movie any of them can remember seeing is Kung Fu-fucking-Panda.

We talk about why they like it, what other movies they might say is in the same genre, and then the eureka moment. An overly tall white kid with long, unkempt hair and glasses looks up and asks “What do you think of A Clockwork Orange?”

“The 1971 film based on the Anthony Burgess novel? Droogies? Alec and ‘Singing in the Rain’?”

I nail that one. We are off. He and I start a mini-discussion of the themes of the film and how the experiment of forcing a kid to watch the horrors of the world on repeat to pacify him has been effectively performed on his contemporaries as they are flooded with images on their smartphones twenty-four hours a day and was the experiment from the film successful? The groupmind of the numb, Cheeto-infused monkeys notices one of their own being taken seriously by the monster adult and they start to wake up.

“Did you like Titanic?” “Which is better—Get Out or Nope?” “Have you seen Akira?”

The ninety-minute class flies by. By the time the bell rings, half the kids are still asking me questions and act almost as if they are fully functioning humans. Then I’m off to Room A313. The Special Education class. Six hours of two and three kids at a time with worksheets and dicking around and boredom. The wifi in the school is shit due to a billion smartphones sucking the juice for Tik Tok so I can barely access even Apple News. I’m exhausted by the end of the day but not the good kind of worn out. The exhaustion of the static.

The secretary in the office asks me if I can come back the next day and the day after that. This is the substitute teacher sweet spot. It isn’t difficult to get work but the perks of being known by the staff and students come with repeat visits. I’m in.

The next day, the secretary puts me in the drama room for the full day. She tells me the word is out, that the kids in the film class had spread the word that I was cool and interesting (an anomaly in the ranks of substitute teachers).

The first group is the Advanced Rep gang. These are the bona fide theater geeks. They have a project that stinks of busy work (pick a monologue and analyze it for theme and structure). No performance of the monologue. No grade because they don’t have a real teacher. So we talk about writing their own monologues. Where to find the material. War stories from my days in Chicago theater. The time flies by.

The second class is StageCraft. Also students interested in the work. More busy work so instead, I give them stagecraft challenges I encountered in the many years in Chicago. Actual challenges we encountered and let them work in groups to solve the issues. They were way into it.

Third class is Intro to Theater. Definitely not theater geeks. Freshman shoved into a class that was like English but wasn’t. We talk about stories and storytelling and then I give them half the time to fuck around.

Lunch Duty. Then another Intro to Theater group. Then Hall Monitoring. Then home. I’m so tired from being actually engaged for most of the day I grab a beer and practically pass out on the couch. This is the good kind of pooped. The type of exhaustion that comes at the end of a productive feeling. I’m finding my stride.

The third day, I’m on my game. All the things I remembered from being a teacher in Chicago, the decade when I had my own classroom and own rules, came back in force. I discard the work sheets and we have active discussions about theater, art, music, writing and the perils involved in doing anything truly creative in a society that rewards mediocrity and conformism over originality. In every class at least one student asks me if I’ll be their permanent drama teacher. I’m new and I’m different. I’m not from ‘round these parts and the New Age Hippie teacher I was in the 1990’s fascinates these idiots. I have a ball. After being lied to and discarded by my soulmate I start to regain the idea that I am worth something, that I do bring some value to the world.

The thing I remind myself is that I'm not looking to get back into teaching children again. I did it in the 90's, was damn good at it, wrote a book about it, and now have other things to do. That said, being a good substitute teacher is sort of like being a really good pick up basketball player in a back lot court. No one expects you to make the shots but you can and do. Fun. Innocuous. Temporary.

This week I'll swing out to a few different high schools and see what Wichita looks like from different angles. Funny, though. The movies made about teachers are legendary. As far as I know there are only a handful about substitute teachers and they aren't heartwarming, inspirational fare.

#teaching #substitute teaching

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curlytemple · 4 years

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niche interests list

okay sure yes this is fun! i havent posted a thing like this in such a long time. thank you new gal pal @scottspack for tagging me!

pigs????

alright first lets throw it back to preschool! my fav childhood toys were my baby doll (snookums) and a plush pig that my grandma got me that i just called ‘pig’ ...i watched the babe movies countless times, and piglet? that anxious little guy GETS ME bro. when my preschool did a nativity play and my class got to choose an animal to be in baby jesus’ manger, my mother recalls me saying that i would be a pig because jewish people (jesus christ) wouldnt eat me. she has no idea how or when i learned about kosher foods. ironically despite my namesake i was too afraid of the movie charlotte’s web to watch it more than once because the scary farmer tries to kill wilbur for being small and the pretty spider dies.

sugar creek gang

OKAY this is a book series from the 40s-70s about a group of christian little boys in indiana who went on adventures in the woods and helped people. my dad read a LOT of chapter books to me as bedtime stories when i was little (see also the mandie series, nancy drew and the hardy boys, little house on the prairie) but sugar creek gang is one that really hit. i read all 36 books with dad and at least once again on my own. there was a series of 4 or 5 movies in the early 2000s when i was the Perfect age to have a crush on most if not all of them. this might be too much detail but i have to tell you about these boys. we WILL not be revisiting the heavy religious themes.

the narrator is bill who is Good and Kind and wants to be a doctor when he grows up. his best friend is a chubby boy nicknamed poetry because he memorizes and quotes poems, he is the Detective of the group. BIG JIM is the leader of the group who is supposed to be like, 14, which was very cool and hot, to me. and yes there is a little jim, who is the baby of the group. then there is CIRCUS who is known for his climbing and acrobatics, and his FIVE SISTERS AND BEAUTIFUL SINGING VOICE. dreamboy. i’m almost done listing boys, i promise. a boy called dragonfly who is allergic to everything and hella superstitious. later in the series a new boy named tom moves to town and tom has an older brother bob who is NOT A CHRISTIAN (bully)

tangentially, the buttercream gang, a movie from 1992 that was almost definitely made by some christians who grew up reading the sugar creek gang series which i’m guessing on vibes alone. will spare you Good Boy details but scott is in love with his best friend pete who moves to chicago and falls in with a bad crowd and scott just refuses to stop LOVING HIM. very gay christian film in retrospect.

peter pan

so i know liking disney’s peter pan isnt niche, but it was the way i liked it. tinker bell stan from day one, i watched all of those disney fairies movies, even the ones that came out after i was definitely not intended audience. there was an online pixie hollow game where you could design your own fairies and play mini games where you gathered dew drops or something. had a HUGE CRUSH on jeremy sumpter in peter pan (2003) then i got really darkly obsessed with the idea of growing up when i was 12 or 13, and everything peter pan was deeply My Shit for my entire adolescence. i read the original book and every other twisted version of the story i could find and seriously freaked myself out about wasting my youth.

shug

you’ve probably heard of jenny han now, or at least the netflix adaptations for to all the boys i’ve loved before and the sequel ps i still love you (always and forever, lara jean, coming soon?) but before she wrote THOSE, she wrote my first ever Favorite Book, about annemarie “shug” wilcox, a girl in the summer before starting middle school. it is SO engraved on my heart i cannot explain. i felt so incredibly understood and cant even tell you how many times i read it. thinking about all of the ways it made me feel SEEN is actually making me very tender so i’m gonna go on.

the summer series

on the subject of jenny han, since she was now my Favorite author, when she came out with the summer i turned pretty in 2009, i was ALL IN. it’s not summer without you, and we’ll always have summer were published the next two years. a coming of age series about a girl isabel “belly” conklin who stays at her mother’s best friend's house at the beach in the summers. i really could talk about it forever yall. i actually dont know how to be succinct about it. i will try. her mom’s friend has TWO BOYS. one brother, jeremiah, is the golden boy and her best friend who is in love with her! the older one CONRAD is her childhood crush who's just sort of around while belly is firmly getting over her childish feelings and going out and experiencing teen beach life with jeremiah for the first time and figuring out who she is and wants to be! by the end of the summer he admits he feels differently about her (hence belly internalizing this as The Summer I Turned Pretty) and they get together. this is already too much so i will just say that the next two books deal with a PROFOUND LOSS and the selfishness of grief and the SELFLESSNESS OF CONRAD and i will absolutely lose my shit if netflix picks it up for a second jenny han series adaptation.

pappyland

this was a kids show in the 90′s that features a character named Pappy Drew-It, an artist dressed like a 49er who lives in a magic cabin in pappyland. there’s tons of characters and music and life lessons but the meat of every episode is a detailed drawing how-to (pappy is actually a cartoonist, michael cariglio) and i have a hard back cover sketch book from my grandpa that i FILLED with drawings that pappy and DOODLEBUG taught me to do. there is a running gag that pappy always breaks his crayons.

boy meets world

i KNOW this is beloved by many but i’m counting it because i’m simply too young to have such an obsession with it! the show ran from 1992-2000. i was born in 1996, but reruns on the disney channel and abc family cemented it as one of my favorite shows. cory and shawn, closer than brothers, shameless homoromantics, shawn is cory’s first wife!!!!! truly showed me what a best friend can and should be!!!!!! the great love of your life!!!!! TOPANGA, the og weird feminist girl who said stop shaving your legs and start speaking your mind, ladies! the characters are so richly developed that they are real people to my heart. YES every character on this show is in their late 30s-early 40s and YES i feel like we grew up together. in season one they’re in the 6th grade and we follow them all the way to COLLEGE. countless poignant life lessons, often literally dictated by the wise and hilarious MR. FEENY, cory’s next door neighbor and somehow one of his teachers for YEARS. my love was only solidified by the 2014 girl meets world reboot, centered on cory and topanga’s daughter and her best friend. (which was literally cancelled because disney didn’t want to transition from a kids show to a teen show, something essential to the original. also because that teen show would have had CANON LESBIANS. extremely shameful move in 2017!) boy meets world lives rent free in my heart and i will never evict it!!!!!!!

i consulted my mother when i got stumped for more and she reminded me that i had obsessions with the impressionist art period and babies and ANYTHING fairies or pixies, and i was way too young when my love of the canadian teen after school special degrassi began. she also said bob ross, which i was hesitant to include because he’s been super ~trendy in recent years, but to be fair (To Be Faaairrr) she’s right! i don’t think people really watched the joy of painting as much as i have throughout my life. best sick day show of all time.

lastly i could honestly list anna herself as a niche interest, my mom actually metioned that ive always hyperfixated on my girl friends (gay) but i’ll just note that YES friday night lights, YES barry lyga novels. love to share so many things with you, niche or not, they’re niche in Our Mind.

#with the baby obsession came an obsession with adoption #my aunt and uncle adopted and when i learned that there were ORPHANS whew #i was in preschool judging people for getting pregnant when there were SO many babies without mommies #she had a good point!#also does being a niall girl in 2012 count

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wordssometimesfail · 4 years

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Leave me alone I really am going to bed but give me prime numbers to wake up to

*muah* Sleep well and enjoy

2. Your most rewatched movie. I have no way of verifying this, but proooobably The Fellowship of the Ring.

3. A movie you quote on a daily basis. I’m sitting here, wracking my brains, trying to think of a single movie that I quote on even a semi-regular basis, and literally the only thing I can think of is The Office, which is not a movie. But it’s the truth, unfortunately, because I am a basic bitch.

5. Top 5 films of your favorite actor and actress. I GENUINELY don’t have a favourite actor or actress, I have a harem, and when asked to name all the members I will forget like six. I have been advised one of my favourite actors is Will Ferrell, in which case my top 5 Will Ferrell movies are (in no order): Megamind, Stranger Than Fiction, Step Brothers, The Other Guys, and Zoolander.

7. A movie storyline you wish you had actually lived. EASY - the plot of Labyrinth. I desperately want to be drawn into a nonsensical quest in a magical world of my own design, befriend some monsters, and have them party in my room.

11. Favorite quote(s).

The “It’s like in the great stories” monologue from The Two Towers The entire iocane scene from The Princess Bride “Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great... You have no power over me.”

13. Top 5 favorite male performances. Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, Richard Gere in Chicago, Bernard Hill in The Two Towers and Return of the King, Leonardo di Caprio in Shutter Island. These are literally the first 5 things to pop fully formed in my mind that actually fit the criteria, so I’m missing a thousand things.

17. List all you’ve seen from [insert actor/actress/director]. HA, you didn’t specify one, so I don’t have to answer this question :P

19. An underrated actress. Does Amy Adams count? She’s an A-lister, but I really love her performances and I feel like people don’t talk about her enough.

23. An overrated director. Wes Anderson - I’ve never really been a fan of his style, honestly. Also Jon Favreau because he has no vision, or if he does, it’s buried under ten feet of overproduced Disney notes.

29. Your first favorite actor. Probably Leonardo di Caprio? I’ve honestly never had all-time favourite actors/actresses (more like... a stable of myriad faves), but when I was a teenager I decided I needed a Favourite and I picked di Caprio because I had just seen What’s Eating Gilbert Grape for the first time and was obsessed with his performance.

31. Favorite animated film. Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Catch me trying to sing the Latin chorus bits in “The Bells of Notre Dame” and FAILING. HORRIBLY.

37. Share an unpopular film opinion you have. The Shining is a lifeless, cold piece of shit that saps the humanity from its characters to the point where Jack Nicholson is absolutely wasted on a shallow, albeit terrifying, version of his book counterpart. Also, I didn’t like No Country for Old Men, it was boring, and I don’t care how technically excellent it was.

41. How many movies have you seen (rough estimation)? I... have no idea how to answer this question because numbers have no meaning, but... okay, so when I was a kid I once made my mom count all the VHS tapes we had, and there were well over 100, and that was when I was very young, so. Hundreds by this point. No clue how many.

43. A film that scarred you. The Black Cauldron. 4 year olds... shouldn’t watch that movie.

47. Movies that you think everyone should watch (not necessarily your favorites). The Princess Bride, so you can get all those references people keep making to The Princess Bride.

53. Favorite silent film. Uh... I have seen like. 1 silent film, so Nosferatu :P

59. Least favorite genres. Substanceless action (no likeable characters, no heart, no point).

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purplesurveys · 4 years

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896

Would you ever try Fear Factor for one million dollars? Why or why not? Yes. It would make for hilarious stories for get-togethers and I think that winning a million dollars that I could use up for the rest of my life doing some dumb dares for a few hours would be worth it. If you have a camera, when do you use flash? Only if it’s dim. I don’t like the effect that flash gives. What would you do with eighty-three crazy straws? Find an aunt or uncle with a kid who’s having a birthday party soon so they can use the straws as giveaways or something. If you use hair spray, what brand do you use the most? I don’t. Is Catcher in the Rye in your library by any chance? It’s probably in another college’s library, most likely our college for the arts and letters. There’s no reason for it to be in a mass communication library.

What if there was no such thing as the word 'one'? Then that would imply that we have/have to have plurals of everything, which just sounds a bit bizarre to me.

What do you have automatic sympathy for? The 11,000 employees of the country’s biggest broadcasting network that was recently officially shut down by our – surprise surprise – government. These are people who weren’t even involved in the network’s franchise renewal status (which was/is the main issue), people who have families, people who relied on these jobs to get by during a worldwide pandemic, people who loved their jobs, people who found family in these jobs, It’s absolutely crazy how people can defend their stance against the network and justify the loss of 11,000 jobs. What is a cool disposable object? I don’t know who looks at disposable objects and thinks they’re ‘cool,’ but the first thing I thought of was my vape pen of choice, which are disposable. It has enough puffs to last several months with me so it’s more convenient for me to keep buying them than spending a large amount on a refillable one. Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan? Why? Hilary Duff as Lizzie McGuire is more nostalgic to me; I used to watch it nearly everyday. I never watched Lindsay’s movies other than Herbie. What do you think of the actor Michael Cera? No opinion but I remember the time when he was often used on 9Gag memes. Simpler times lol. Anyway, I haven’t seen any of his movies. What is the best thing about a Barbie doll? I think it’s really fun how they’ve come up with a bazillion outfits for Barbies and Kens. And different versions too – as far as I know there’s been a Filipino Barbie for a while :) What is something you'd say in your will? If I passed any time soon I’d like to include some things about my dogs and how they’re supposed to be taken care of. If we’re talking about what I’m putting in my will if I ever reach like 80, I just wanna make sure every person who’s been in my life and stayed for a bit is mentioned and thanked and I wanna make the list as expansive as I possibly can at that age. Idk, I’ve always been sentimental. Any thoughts on fake abortion clinics? What??? I don’t know what those are and what they do, but they sound awful. What was a username you'd thought wouldn't be taken but was taken? I’ve tried using my full name as a username in a few websites and seen them being taken. My first and last names don’t make a common pair, so I’ve always found it surprising. Cherry or peanut ice cream? Peanut. Not gonna lie, it’s an unusual flavor – but Asians kinda put peanuts on everything heh. What is your dream cellphone? Why? Whatever new phone Apple puts out because unfortunately I buy into toxic consumerist shit like that lol Would you rather be watching The Bachelor or The Bachelorette? Neither. From one to ten, how big of a movie buff are you? I’d give myself an 8. I’ve seen my fair share of movies and I can honestly say that my favorite films are not cliche picks, but I’ve also yet to see a bunch of classics that other ~movie buffs~ hail as being excellent movies like Taxi Driver, Silence of the Lambs, Rocky, American Psycho, etc. I also haven’t been watching movies as much as I used to, which takes down another point for me. Who is a celebrity you think will never get into trouble? The Irwin kids. I wouldn’t call them celebrities per se though; they’re in the spotlight for the most wholesome reasons. I’ve seen every segment Robert Irwin has had on Jimmy Fallon and it’s amazingly precious. What is an important holiday to you? Why? Probably the EDSA Anniversary because without it we’d still be under a dictatorship. Name a catty girl you really dislike. I wouldn’t call anyone I know that. What is a museum you would like to go to? The top 3 museums that I would love to visit are the Anne Frank House, the Met, and the Art Institute of Chicago. And wherever Monet’s paintings are, because he’s my favorite artist. Personally, do you look better with short hair or long hair? Short. Long, frizzy hair does not look good on me and on anyone else. What was the reason why you last blocked a person from your IM? He was a stranger who hit on me. I added him back only because we had a considerable amount of mutual friends and I thought that maybe he used to be a classmate or something, but he messaged me some shit that he had probably copy-pasted to 700 other girls saying like ‘hey do you mind if you and I talk? I find you really pretty’ like six seconds after adding him back. It was so fucking creepy and I never blocked someone so quickly. I was already in a foul mood that night so I also showed the brief interaction to Gab and I gave her freedom to curse the shit out of the guy if she wanted to. What is a cliche thing that happens a lot in anime? I don’t like anime and have never watched it. What are your views on the cartoon show Invader Zim? I’ve never seen that either. If you have some, what is tonight's homework about? I don’t have homework anymore. If you have one, what is your favorite sushi flavour? Cream cheese salmon rolls from a local place called Torch. What is the first thing you think of when I say 'Jack'? Rose. Do you understand JavaScript coding? A teeny bit, thanks to the theme customizations I used to do on Tumblr when I was 14. What would you do if you found a gun in your best friend's bedroom? Confront them, and maybe even scold them. I definitely would be angry. Not even just because it could mean they’re suicidal, but because I don’t believe in guns. What do you call your grandparents? I call both sets Lolo and Lola. When I say 'Go', you say: I just remember the song Green Light by Beyoncé because the chorus on that is her screaming ‘Go.’ What colour do you usually paint your nails? I never paint them. They’re pretty, but I never saw them as a necessity. What would be a cool earring design? People come up with cool designs all the time now though. I’m completely sure there are a million versions of this now but I would love sriracha sauce earrings haha. What do you think of raccoons? No opinion as I’ve never encountered them. Any thoughts on the actor Paul Rudd? NEVER AGES Who is the better liar: your mother or your best friend? Mom. Gab will lie to me sometimes but I can always tell. Are breast implants something you'd consider? Why or why not? I considered it when I was a teenager because people used to pick on me for being flat-chested, as if I had a choice as to what size my body would end up being. Also, flat chests were the butt of so many jokes in the early 2010s so it made me insecure for a very long time. Nowadays the environment is a lot nicer and I’m seeing many flat-chest positivity posts (if that’s even a thing) so I’ve changed my mind about implants. Besides nightmares, what is the scariest thing about sleeping? Sleep paralysis. You can wake up from nightmares. Do you find the phrase 'nom nom nom' annoying? Not as much as ‘rawr’ annoys me. Do you look better with red lipstick or black lipstick? I look good in neither but I would go with red. When was the last time you had chocolate milk? Oooooh it’s been a while :( I feel like that’s something people have to start selling more, honestly. I don’t see chocolate milk being sold other than at the grocery or convenience stores and ugh, I just want more restaurants to add it on their menus lol. That being said, the last time I had it was in January, during a journalism workshop that we hosted in a school in Marikina. The teachers offered us that and a Fudgee Bar as thank-you snacks :)

#survey #surveys

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toongrrl-blog · 4 years

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The Mommy Myth: The War Against Welfare Mothers (Part One)

This gif is from the 1970s film Claudine, a romantic comedy starring James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll about a garbage man and a welfare mother trying to make the relationship and where he helps provide for her home and kids without the social worker checking in.

We check in with The New Yorker, who took a break from their cartoons to cover a welfare mother named Carmen Santana (not her real name): she is Puerto Rican American (and judging by the text’s descriptions of her “wide nose”, complexion, curly dark hair, and thick lips, she must be Afro-Latina) who weighs over 200 lbs and boy the writer was having a field day describing her heft and body. She has no interest in “national or international events” (common flaw that goes across class lines), she spends her day watching soap operas, cursing in Spanish and giving her many kids “a good cuffing” and they just throw the trash out the window. Her kitchen is filthy and her philosophy is “what will be, will be” (a common thing) and sits all the time even when she is cooking while her kids’ bedroom is decorated with obscene graffiti; she had her first child at age 15 and went on to have eight more kids by three different men and her mother had three children by different men and now Carmen’s daughter is also on welfare. She spends the money from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) on makeup and perfume and hair (honestly wasn’t that a thing at some point? Like Midge Maisel and her mother make sure their husbands never see them without perfect hair and makeup) and junk food for the kids and she also plays the numbers where she spends her winnings on “jewelry , beer, and liquour” and “trips to Puerto Rico”. I guess we are not supposed to sympathize with this woman.

Carmen was an example of a stereotype that was used to represent and demonize welfare mothers. Johnnine Tillmon, the first chairwoman of the group National Welfare Rights Organization saw welfare and the stereotypes as a feminist issue.

I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. In this country, if you’re any one of those things---poor, black, fat, female, middle-aged, on welfare---you count less as a human being.

She even said that the biggest reason that people believe the stereotype of the welfare mother is that they are “special versions of the lies that society tells about all women”, sadly she wasn’t listened to in the mainstream media where welfare mothers were deviants in a culture that valued the rugged individual, relentless hard work and sacrifice, slim bodies aided by Bowflex or Thighmaster, and shiny blond hair with perky smiles. Yo because of this stereotype, women of color with several children are considered suspect. It was also another way to pit moms against moms, the resentment of packing the kids’ lunch and work at a dull 9 to 5 job or scrub the kitchen floors while this stereotype gets to have sex with whoever and drink booze with tax dollars. Even Time magazine went in:

Here’s a few facts: the average welfare family in 1994 had three members, the mother and two children. 39% were White and 37% were Black, African Americans numbered 12% of the national population but were about 35-37% of the welfare population and African Americans were three times as likely as White Americans to live below the poverty level. Only 10% of AFDC mothers had four or more children and 80% had one or two kids and figures in 1993 shown 75% of adults left welfare within two years and 1/2 of single mothers worked while on welfare and 1/3 were working to supplement the minuscule allotment and get off from unemployment. But that was lost on the media that focused on families with two or more generations on welfare (a tiny fraction of welfare recipients) even focusing on unwed teen welfare moms because they were...SHOCKING! Only 1% were teen mothers. Welfare mothers were known only by first name and she lived in the urban decay of New York, Camden (New Jersey), Chicago, or Detroit; they were black and unmarried and had a bunch of kids who don’t share a common biological father and she smoked and painted her nails and gave soda to her baby (OMG imagine 2010s soda freaks) and her face was pixelated in the media. Some of them were depicted as cynical about life and motherhood, it wasn’t sexy for them and at least they felt ambivalence (which was soooooo disco era).

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Then came the 1990s where the moderate Democratic Clinton administration introduced “Welfare Reform” where President Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” and he was just following his predecessors: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush (the first) regarding their attitude towards welfare recipients. The Welfare to Work program who were being trained by job placement programs that prepared them for low-paying jobs in retail and in service and the resources for job training were limited (also if your hours took you away from your kids?). Also it was hard for welfare to work moms working to move up in their jobs and often mostly got gigs like seasonal retail.

The depiction of welfare mothers was different from the celebrity mom: she wasn’t ascribed emotions where her eyes welled up with tears or laughed, she wasn’t well lit with a light or a rosy focus, never seen holding her child up or clutching the child and magazines like Redbook or McCall’s never did a cover story with a welfare mom and her kids done up and showing the readers fun things they do with little or no money or touring New York City on $10 for a day or games to play while waiting in long lines (honestly that is a good idea, someone pay Susan and Meredith if the magazines do that). Also if you were a woman of color, especially a young one or a poor one (or both) you weren’t supposed to have the “baby lust” so gushed about in celebrity mom profiles; trust me I grew up a Latina kid in Central California and many older women like my mom would worry about the girls that want to have babies so bad or fall in love hard and fast, a young Karen Wheeler in 1967 can give all to family and babies and staying home but it is more precarious for a young girl of color.

The media depiction of poor people wasn’t always so negative: political scientist Martin Gilens found that when the “War on Poverty” began, where the Lyndon B. Johnson administration focused on eliminating poverty and started programs like Head Start rather than piss on poor people, coverage focused on poor white people in rural areas like Appalachia or in the Rustbelt where mines or factories closed down, these were the faces of The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family who fought against hardship on their way to a better life. After Michael Harrington published his book The Other America, public support for ending poverty was strong. But then came the riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit (just a few) where mostly people of color fought back against law enforcement and the media used images of African-Americans to illustrate their pieces on welfare, which reinforced stereotypes about welfare and as the coverage became more negative, the skin color got darker (even though statistics then and now showed many more white recipients of welfare)

How about how the face of welfare became so feminized? In the 1930s, when the Welfare program and Social Security began under the New Deal by President FDR, a lot of women of color were barred from welfare because of discriminatory practices, this changed with the Civil Rights Movement which opened up some doors for women of color to get assistance for their children and households. Before the Welfare recipient was faceless or usually a man, who got rich off welfare and bought Cadillacs with the money, something that Richard Nixon really clung to and he asked Johnny Cash to perform the song “Welfare Cadillac” at a White House event sparking controversy. Indeed when Cash met with Nixon, he gave him a private concert with songs that were more compassionate and less reactionary than what Nixon wanted. In the early 1960s, magazines like Look or Reader’s Digest wrote to readers about women who sent their many children to beg for money while the mother ate steak with their boyfriend, or worse, spent the money on narcotics and kept giving birth to more than 10 kids. The image of poor, fertile mothers on taxpayer money was more infuriating than that of a able-bodied man getting the money, but making welfare moms work was shocking (as the system was designed for widows to stay home with their children and not worry about money), even a stinging David Brinkley chafed at leaving kids at a daycare center...it would cost the taxpayer more.

Ronald Reagan coined the term “welfare queen” (look it up) and made exaggerated anecdotes and given how people were drawn to him (looking at you Mike and Nancy’s parents), he was believed despite him not citing sources or studies. Reagan voters fell for the image of a welfare mother who spent money for fancy cars, vacations, designer clothes, and played the system (there were a few like Dorothy Woods, but again if this were common, the landscape of the inner city would look a lot different...) It was a dark time, the Religious Right took control, Proposition 13 in California put a limit on property taxes and started many tax revolts to limit government spending, and let’s not forget Ronald Reagan opposed the following:

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Fair-Housing Legislation in California

Legislation to declare Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday

How does that Reagan/Bush ‘84 sign look Ted and Karen?

Stay tuned.....

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fulltimereviewer · 5 years

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Top 50 Best Transformers Fanfiction Stories 2020

Best Transformers Fanfiction Updates That You Must Read

Since Childhood, I am watching transformers and looking forward to becoming a transformer one day, Grew up by Reading Transformers Fanfiction Stories and was always amazed by the fictions that used to pop out from such inspiring Fanfiction Lovers. Also liking the Transformer Fanfiction Crossover a lot.

If I Start Giving my Opinions about Transformers Fanfiction Lemon and Transformers Crossover fanfiction, I don't think so that I won't end the topic of Transformers Fanfiction Stories even in 24 hours. Lukas Schimik Agreed ! Don't know why everybody hates it, I think it's still my number 1 TF movie! Optimus new look, Lockdown & Galvatron, KsI (bots), Dinobots, cast ( HATED this Sam & Mikeala ) and the TF/human conflict. Still love it. Miguel GC Gamer Age of Extinction is the only film that entertains that I don't skip any parts of the movie and I like all the characters in this film and the transformers designs are great, dino bots are Awsome. Vincent H well....bad taste is also bad taste at the end of the day. I know you younger kids think that everyone is supposed to have an opinion and everything is subjective blah blah blah but if you're a cinephile than the Transformers are objectively bad films. They are cynical cash grabs made to make money in China. Bay and the producers have said as much. I mean you can like whatever you want. If you wanna listen to Teletubbies soundtrack all day that's your right....but that does mean you have shitty taste. It's okay. Not everyone has good taste. urtpro 2 I'm not hating I'm genuinely curious. I certainly like it more than Last Knight but barely lol. I'm curious the reasons why AOE fans consider it one of the better Transformers movies. I will say it was nice to switch up the protagonist and all that since Sam Witwicky had worn out his welcome by the third film. And the actress who played Wahlberg's daughter was smoking hot, so that was a plus too. Oliver Parker I thought the premise of the world hating and hunting the Transformers(regardless of Faction), cuz of what happened in Chicago(in DOTM), was kool, MW was a refreshing Main Hero over Shia tbh, and Lockdown was Badass! Honestly kinda just laughed off the whole Romeo and Juliette law thing as being just a bad movie joke! I’m mean honestly I know there’s no such law, and as such it didn’t really bother me! Just rather thought it was somewhat silly! Yann Labeille Well Lockdown was a pretty good villain for once in the movies. However Galvatron went nowhere after this. Anthony That isn't true. I saw Bumblebee yesterday and I find it Like watching E.T., the movie is just on Charlie, not really much on Bee. The only g1 part is the first 5 minutes of the movie. Too much 80s references. Sometimes is even boring for me. It Was a cute movie but absolutely not my favourite. I still prefere the first one. Aron T-900 I'd rather get vibes from ET and Iron Giant instead of witnessing stupid humor, unnecessary hot shots, dogs humping each other, unrealistic explosions, parents acting like they belong in a cartoon, patriotism and confusing slo-mo action sequences. Cam Rich I preferred the first and third ones as they have so much more action in them making the films actually entertaining, when most of bumblebee is almost like a compilation of ‘cute’ little clips of bumblebee and that annoying girl taking up almost the entirety of the movie. Max Ramirez Personally prefer the 2007 movie because it's just overall more entertaining to me. Also, you can pretty much tell Bumblebee was a movie that was directed towards kids so 2007 wins for me So Sit back and enjoy reading my favorite transformers fanfiction lemon and Transformers fanfiction Crossovers Collection. That I have collected for you guys. I Hope You Guys liked our collection of the best transformers fanfiction stories and updates that we have presented above for all fanfiction lovers out here. Transformers Fanfiction Crossover Stories 2020(Updated) Transformers is America based Franchise that was first seen in the 1980s globally. So the first five transformers Films was directed by Michael Bay. I really believe that this was the boost up for the Transformers Fanfiction Crossover stories that I really liked about among the whole and sole of the transformers fanfiction stories including the lemon version of the franchise. Minaya Rojas Tony: We have a Hulk! Optimus: We have a Grimlock! Porg King VII Bee is here what would Optimus want with that what would he take her hostage IT SOUNDS LIKE HE HAS BEEN BRAIN WASHED BY DESEPTAGONS Siidimus Prime! Except they transform their aliens they have Real blasters Different Voices blood Etc. arfhanisbest The interesting thing is that transformers would actually make for good marvel villains. dave tasca The original transformers comics were made by marvel and marvel had to do with the original transformers tv show so they really should try to get the rights back jovinprime Poop soc This would've been more awesome if gi joe, rom the spaceknight, M.A.S.K., micronauts and the other properties interfere with the whole marvel universe and the transformers both. That would be, not only a big, giant, massive crossover event, but a... gigantic, space-involving, multiversal collusion as well Darkknight329 yes megatron hack the armor with Soundwave and turn it off then they all just step on them but they will throw hulk to cybertron and leave him to the toxic oxygen Dr. Nobody Celz On they are robots what is a snap gonna do I know buckys arm was turned to dust but still they have weapons that can make thanos cheese agnas yes because they’re alive. They go to the allspark when they die, they are alive just like us, just made of metal. Bee is here Tony: We have thanos Optimus: We have your mom Tony:0_0 ok you win now give me my mom Hoping that you guys liked our collection of the topmost fanfics about the transformers fanfiction crossover flavors that we have published above this.

Transformers Fanfiction Lemon Version 2020 Funny Part of the Franchise is that the transformer's movies, on one hand, was loved by the fans and on the other hand there were critics about the direction "Worst Director of all Time". Still, there are some dirty minded people who are always in search of the Transformers Fanfiction Lemon and some people also call it Transformers lemon Fanfiction. Night light I really want to be apart of one of micheal bays movie of transformers Flo Parsons see this is why I love transformers, because the actors ACTUALLY seem like they are having fun, and they are such fun films to watch obert Delgad Even though the movie sequels are not that great, but you have to give Michael Bay a lot of Credit for what he does. fake lol Bay is a genius I mean, I wouldn't be able to figure out the scale of you know the explosions Like the layout nig*a LOL, lol or as you typed if, Lol: an acronym for laugh(ing) out loud or lots of laughs, some say it is Lots of love, is a popular element of Internet slang. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to-face communication. Alex Bruh Bumblebee knows how to pick up ladies more than Sam 😂 lala I remember being a kid and having the biggest crush for Megan. Good lord she was so hot Michael ceasar Back than I thought Sam was looking at her belly and so was I saying "Hot belly I guess." hotman 280 Michael Bay while directing: Yeah Megan arch your back, perfect perfect. Get a good shot of her sweat glistening tanned bronze body. Yeah just like that. chief ada Yeah right. That engine is a big block. Fuel injected side draft 8 barrel carburetors. Hell even the headers are up and over side mount. And the damn engine is worth more then the car. As he only paid $4500.00 That damn engine alone cost $20,000.00! Leave the critics aside all I want to know is: How did you people find our transformers fanfiction lemon version? comment down below if you guys liked this collection on some of the best lemon flavors of transformers fanfiction stories. Transformers fanfiction Bumblebee Stories Updated The best part of the Transformers franchise is that bumblebee is the only character that got most of the positive reviews. This can be a reason that people Love Transformers Fanfiction Bumblebee Version a lot. No worries because we have provided some of the best Bumblebee fanfiction stories that you will enjoy reading. Master Yoda "Wasp", "Stinger" or "Hornet" would be appropriate Decepticon sounding names as "Bumble Bee" sounds too friendly. ron 1j2j barricade is a ford mustang and bee is a Chevrolet camero trust me they will not be friends pro gmer yes i do lol they killed ironhide and ratchet and jazz and sideswipe is already missing dnt know if hes alive but hes my favorite hari bhaskar I'm Bumblebee was a Decepticon he'd be dead like the other Decepticons, because boi they sure kill Decepticons like it's nothing. mighty raju Blackout had skills. Shockwave had skills. The Fallen had skills. Yet they all died like they're nothing. Why? Cause they're Decepticons lol. It's simple rlly, they kill off Decepticons like they're nothing that's just how it is lol. habob What about “what if sentinel prime didn’t betray the autobots” I think age of extinction and beyond wouldn’t have happened since sentinel basically destroyed N.E.S.T. And also Rachet and Ironhide wouldn’t have died so the Autobots would have had a great advantage, and then Sam would still be with the autobots since he disappears after DOTMBasically, I’m saying that the Transformers franchise would have dramatically changed if Sentinel didn’t betray the Autobots. ShyGuy 15 In the movies, technically Megatron is an anti-hero. The first movie makes an acception bc he was using the allspark for pure evil, also in Aoe no reason told us what he was trying to accomplish other than detonating the seed. So 2, 3, and 5, he has reasons to his doing Rotf: using the pyramid to kill the sun and repopulate cybertron. Dotm: rebuild cybertron. TLK: kill unicron using cybertron. This is all in my own mind, not sure if anyone else agrees with me Simon Tyson I forget what it was called, but there was a comic book series where Megatron was an Autobot. It basically swapped all the characters so that Optimus, Bumblebee, Iron Hide, etc. were bad guys. Megatron, Starscream, etc. were good guys Dank Starscream If Bayformer Megatron's history is similar to the IDW comics Megatron's history...then that would mean the Autobot government was not all that good, and would be directly responsible for why Megatron turned out the way he did. Because he was a slave to their functionalist system of control, and he would have remained a slave worker miner if he didn't rise up from the lifestyle forced on him and formed the Decepticon faction... Though it seems to me that if this were the case, Bayformers Megatron would still have become a gladiator before forming the Decepticons...and then eventually he found his way into more of the politics of Cybertron after one day meeting with Optimus Prime (Orion Pax at the time) and then they became brothers/friends. In that sense...it would be similar to how the history of the two were from the show TF Prime. They could still keep the part with the whole Optimus being a knight too, somehow... So in short...Megatron really did not start out as a bad guy at all, it was the way in which he reacted to everything that made him turn out a 'bad guy'. She-Venom What if Megatron is a good guy in the movies? Simple answer is right here becuse Optimus accepted become a Prime if he didnt accept Optimus and Megatron wouldnt fight each other and best brothers it was Optimus fault he started the war i think Megatron is a good guy Hoping that you guys liked our collection of the topmost fanfics about the transformers fanfiction crossover flavors that we have published above this. People Love Bumblebee! i love him/her because bumblebee is cool, let me know why do you love Bumblebee and more importantly why do you guys love Transformers fanfiction on Bumblebee. Transformers Fanfiction OC Version Earning a total amount of $4.3 Billion, transformers became the 13th highest-grossing film series in the world. The Transformers Fanfiction Fans Should be happy to know that the Transformers franchise grossed a total of $1 Billion each from two superhit blockbuster movies. Comment Down the names of those movies if you know them. Jack R I think the first one was more epic just cause the fight scenes were cool and it was the first time we saw something like that. But the writing and characters were absolutely horrific. Bumblebee had much better writing and characters especially the character relationship between Bumblebee and the girl which is much better than the relationship between Sam and bumblebee. Dotm Shockwave Yeah I dont know how he put tlk over revenge and extinction. The last knight is incredibly boring and the only remaining aspect left to enjoy (the action) is incredibly dull in it compared to all the other films. There are no good fight scenes. Which is likely why it bombed so hard Ur mom Gai Ok imo the last knight is my fave AND I ONLY like TF5 is cuz bumblebee new form looks good as hell and Optimus prime vs bumblebee AND there is explosions. EVERYWHERE Boss I definitely didn't think it was my favorite. It depends on what you are looking for in a movie. If you like character relationships and a girl and her problems trying to find her way, then you'll like it. If you like transformers actions and interactions, you may not like it as much. Even though the Bay movie didn't focus enough on the transformers, this one did even less The Burden of Bordem I'm a decepticon fan and none of the main decepticons were even given a name in the movie. They were just there to be bad. The Burden of Bordem For me I think this film would have worked much better if they just had Starscream as the main villain, and maybe Barricade hunting bumblebee and give them a more personal relation ship as enemies. But like I said, it end up being a movie about a girl and her relation ship with Bumblebee and enemies getting in their way. bandwon he main character is more fleshed out than the others, Bumblebee I guess is as well, but he can't talk so it isn't by much, the story is standard E.T./Iron Giant, the acting is fine, the directing is probably better than the others, the action is good when it happens, but there is far less than the others, and non of the action reached the peak of the Bay movies. and if it wasn't for the fact there were transformers in it I probably wouldn't have really liked it, but it's enough to get you invested and entertained imo. luke jack You really think anyone's gonna take you serious after you typed "Bumble" Haha the 2007 film and DotM were pretty decent films and satisfying in the end. lisa Speaking as a male, it always annoys me, as a child, that certain plot-line of every terribly written sci-fi (mainly Transformers): "main character is a dick=likable guy" "he has 'relatable' problems, that are only explored in the first 15 minutes of the film" "He start having an abusive/creepy relationship (because that's how well written romance works, right...), with the love interest (they barely explore her name)." "1+ hour action scenes" "world is gonna explode (not really)" "Main Character and Love Interest hook up". People always call me "a pussy", because i want equal rights, and then they go make a video about "how everything is now pandering to women, and everything is Woke"... By your perfect logic... most movies are "pandering to males, and straight people only" imo not like super duper mad, but kinda upset. It was actually kinda funny. But dude, I love what you said about Man of Steel in your DC ranking video. I love that you love Man of Steel. Not many do, and it's seriously awesome! IMO I hope You Guys Like our Collection of the best Transformers fanfiction stories along with transformers fanfiction lemon and transformers fanfiction crossover collection. We know that people will like the Transformers Crossover fanfiction and transformers fanfiction bumblebee version stories. If you like These Transformers Fanfiction Stories make sure you share this on various social media, and you can also give credits to our website. Thank You Also, read Star Wars fanfiction Updates 2020 Read the full article

#transformerscrossoverfanfiction #transformersfanfic #transformersfanfiction #transformersfanfictionbumblebee #transformersfanfictioncrossobver #transformersfanfictionlemon #transformersfanfictionnightmare #transformersfanfictionoc

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moonlightmadnessreviews · 5 years

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Child’s Play (2019): Chucky Come Lately, The New Kid in Town

We’re coming up on a month since the release of Orion Pictures’ Child’s Play remake. In the lead up to the polarizing release, there were two very different teams drawn up: you were either Team Good Guy, or Team Buddi. If you were the former, it was thought you were an elitist, unable to see past your love for the original and too closed minded to admit you were even a little curious as to how the new movie would turn out. If you wore the latter team’s jersey, you were part of what is wrong with horror today, ready to gobble up corporate studio schlock even if it means trampling all over the original. At a time when a remake is announced every other week, I want to discuss why it’s okay to root for the home town hero, while also being curious about what the rookie has to offer.

Child’s Play was originally released in 1988, having been written and directed by Tom Holland from a story by Don Mancini, produced by David Kirschner and distributed by MGM. The film was a hit, drawing enough at the box office to spawn six sequels, and the cult following was immediately under the spell of the pint sized, Voodoo practicing antagonist, Charles Lee Ray. I recently turned 30, and it wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I realized the original trilogy was called Child’s Play and not Chucky, as I’d always referred to the movies. Brad Dourif plays Chicago serial killer Charles Lee Ray, The Lakeshore Strangler. After he’s chased into a toy store and fatally wounded by Detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon), Chucky transfers his soul into the body of a Good Guy Doll. The rest of the movie follows Chucky and the first person he reveals his identity to, a six year old boy named Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent), as Chucky murders his way through babysitters, old accomplices and Voodoo mentors! All the while, Chucky preys on Andy’s innocence, telling him they’re “Friends til the end!” simply to make it easier for him to transfer his soul into Andy’s body.

This set up was, and still is, perfect! For much of the movie, Chucky is a stoic rubber doll, resembling one of the Cabbage Patch Dolls that were so popular in the 1980s. It’s clear to see how excited Andy is when he gets the doll as a birthday present, and you feel genuine fear for the kid knowing there’s the soul of a serial killer trapped inside his new best friend! I would give anything to travel back in time to sit in the theater on opening night and experience the moment Chucky finally reveals his true nature to Andy’s Mom! What may seem silly to us now must have made for an awesome group experience in that theater, especially considering the amazing animatronics and Dourif’s fantastic voice over work, his animalistic aggression striking fear into children for years after.

For all the praise we can give Chucky and the lore his movies built up, they did become somewhat formulaic, but Chucky and pals had solidified themselves in the minds and memories of millions. It’s easy to see why fans were hesitant, and confused, when the remake was announced. Some went as far as to write off the movie completely before even hearing what the changes would be. Well, as it turns out, the changes were pretty drastic, in part due to the legal issues of having a remake separate from the Mancini Chucky universe, soon to make a place for itself as a spin off TV show on the SyFy channel.

Child’s Play 2019 has brought Chucky and Andy into the era of asking someone for their WiFi password as soon as you walk through their door. The film is directed by Lars Klevberg (Polaroid) from a screenplay by Tyler Burton Smith (Kung Fury 2) and produced by David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith (IT, Chapter 1 and 2). In our post-Stranger Things world, Andy, played here by Gabriel Bateman (Lights Out), is no longer a six year old child but rather a young teen having trouble fitting in and making friends in his new neighborhood. His mom, Karen Barclay (Aubrey Plaza), is still a single mother working in retail, but the doll she brings home for Andy’s birthday is incredibly different due to the exclusion of one incredibly important character: Charles Lee Ray. Gone is the Voodoo. Gone is the Lakeshore Strangler. Gone is the voice! The new direction is daring to say the least.

In this version, Chucky is a WiFi capable, Cloud connected Buddi doll. As part of their use as an educational tool for children, Buddi dolls learn from their Best Buddies, picking up on their sense of humor, social cues and behaviors. Eventually Buddi could help you keep track of your calendar and even control climate setting in your home. Seems pretty cool, right? Well it would be, except Andy’s Buddi doll was hacked by a disgruntled factory worker who does away with Chucky’s limiters for language, violence, and seemingly even his free will.

What I feel works especially well in the new take is Chucky’s innocence at the start of the movie. A Buddi doll’s only mission is to imprint on their new owner and be the best friend this child could ever ask for. We get scenes of Andy and Chucky playing chess, hanging out, and even looking through scrap books of Andy’s art. Chucky takes a genuine interest in Andy and simply wants to be his Best Buddy, so when Andy is scratched by his mother’s cat, we get the first glimpses into Chucky’s unlocked potential for violence. He wants to punish anyone, or anything, that wishes Andy harm. Chucky hasn’t just imprinted, he is frighteningly obsessed.

One of my favorite scenes plays out as Andy, and his friends Falyn and Pugg (Beatrice Kitsos and Ty Consiglio, respectively) are watching a particularly brutal horror movie. I was genuinely giddy in the theater when the clips started to flash on screen, so I won’t spoil it here. This is where we see Chucky’s gears start to turn. Much like a child who may pick up on violent behavior they’re exposed to, Chucky sees Andy and his friends laughing at the outlandish violence on screen and decides to “entertain” them with a butcher knife.

Through out the course of the 90 minute run time, we see Andy struggling with how to control Chucky, now having gotten the wrong impression of violence and feeling rejected by his Best Buddy. The stakes are raised as Chucky becomes increasingly violent, seeking to please Andy at every turn only to make things worse, like a genie who twists their master’s words, making them sorry for not being more careful with their wishes. Come the third act, we can start to see hints of Chucky’s own fully formed personality, now having been twisted and deranged by the movies events.

This movie was more fun than I anticipated, and it even got my wife’s stamp of approval after I dragged her to the theater with me on opening night! Rather than try to be some incredibly bleak, super realistic take on the story, Child’s Play knew exactly what it was and went all out with the ridiculous concept. The movie’s R rating was also used to its full potential, and though most of the scares are pretty telegraphed, they shower you with so much blood and gore that you can’t help but laugh. Andy’s group of friends, though not nearly as charismatic or fun to watch as the cast of Stranger Things or 2017’s IT, really helped to give the movie some much needed warmth and heart. Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta), who played this movie’s Detective Norris, also gave a great performance, balancing comedy and that detective bravado just right.

The standouts though were Gabriel Bateman and this movie’s Chucky, none other than Mark Hamill (Star Wars and The Joker in Batman The Animated Series, I mean DUH!). Bateman gave a great performance as Andy, carrying a lot of the movie’s emotion, and Hamill helped give this Chucky his own voice. The third act culmination of Chucky’s deranged personality would not have been nearly as effective if not for Hamill’s amazing voice over work. This is not to say though that the movie was perfect. Aubrey Plaza was bland as Karen Barclay, giving every line that classic, so-edgy-it-hurts, Plaza sarcasm. It works on Parks and Rec and even the movie Safety Not Guaranteed, but it feels so out of place here. Thankfully, Bateman was there to sell most of their scenes together, or I would not have been able to buy into their relationship as mother and son, much less care about their survival. In addition to Plaza, there were a lot of jokes in the first and second act that simply didn’t land. The lines fell flat and hardly got more than a chuckle from most of the audience I was with. I’m sure they were after the wit and timing of the young ensemble cast of IT, but that came from time and intensive work building off screen relationships within that cast. Some jerky editing also made the movie feel like it would have benefited from an extra 15 or 20 minutes, leading to certain scenes that were meant to be emotional being brushed over and rushed.

Lastly, let’s address the elephant in the room: Chucky’s redesign. The very first reaction I heard as Chucky’s face flashed on screen was “Ew, what the fu-“. I want to give the effects team credit for sticking to mostly animatronic work once again, but Chucky’s face was simply horrendous. I’d like to think this was intentional, perhaps they wanted to play up the Uncanny Valley effect as much as possible, but I can’t see myself or any other fans saying the design won us over, no matter how fun the movie was.

Did Child’s Play 2019 have to be a Child’s Play movie? No, not at all. In fact, they could have called it “Alexa Gone Wild.” and it would have held much of the same effect. With that being said though, I think I enjoyed it as much as I did because of their new take. It impressed me just enough to leave me thinking “Wow, that was really fun!” I love the original Child’s Play, and Brad Dourif is quite honestly irreplaceable, but the film makers saw the challenge they had with this new version, knew the audience they had to try and win over and they swung for the fences. I may not be able to convince everyone to give this movie a shot, and I’m fine with that, but I think the most important thing to remember is this: If you’re going to update one of my favorite toys, my “Friend til The End”, then make sure the new version keeps me entertained til the end, friend.

Rating: 3.5 Full Moons out of 5 🌕🌕🌕🌗

#Child’s Play #Child’s Play 2019 #Child’s Play Remake #Chucky #Good Guy Doll #Buddi Doll #Brad Dourif #Mark Hamill #Gabriel Bateman #Aubrey Plaza #Horror #Horror Movies #Film Reviews #Movie Reviews #Moonlight Madness #Moonlight Madness Reviews

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supergirlmelbenoist · 5 years

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How Melissa Benoist got ripped for Supergirl

She's not a bird or a plane, and she's definitely not Superman! In 2015, Krypton refugee Kara Zor-El — aka Kara Danvers — threw aside her glasses and donned her family's S-shaped crest to follow in her cousin's footsteps and give National City its very own superhero on the CW's Supergirl. Back then, Melissa Benoist — the actress playing both Supergirl the superpowered alien and Kara the shy personal assistant — was best known to TV fans for her role as sweet newcomer Marley Rose on two seasons of Glee, and she also had a small role in Best Picture-nominated Whiplash.

Taking the lead of a show — especially one with such a strong legacy on-screen and off — was a big step up for Benoist, both performance-wise and also physically. So how did she get ripped for the role? Well, Benoist said that landing the part meant stepping up her workouts, not just because we tend to take our superheroes with six-pack abs and toned biceps, but so that she could keep up with the action. The self-described pacifist and musical theater nerd suddenly found herself learning how to throw a punch and how to fly. So here's how Melissa Benoist toughened up to play Supergirl, at the gym, in her fight scenes, and high up on the wires.

She made it through a full-on audition process

Obviously the CW couldn't cast just anyone as Supergirl, which meant that Melissa Benoist had to go through a rigorous audition process before she got anywhere close to landing the role. The wait was made even more excruciating because, according to Benoist, "I believe I was the first girl they saw." That first audition was in October 2014, and it was just the start. In 2015, she told Entertainment Weekly, "It was a long, drawn-out, three-month process. I auditioned around Halloween 2014 and then didn't land the part until February 2015. I went through multiple screen-tests, multiple auditions with the producing team. There was a lot."

During that extensive audition process, Variety reported that Benoist found a champion in producer Greg Berlanti. "Greg championed me the whole time and was in my corner," Benoist remembered. "Even when I didn't think the part was mine, he was always rooting for me. That support goes a long way, especially when I'm fighting for something I want so badly. His belief in me really touched me." Berlanti echoed the sentiment, saying, "If we had not found her, I would have said, 'I don't want to make this.'"

The first episode aired almost a year after that first audition, on October 26, 2015, and since then, Benoist has seen hundreds of kids in their own versions of her costume. "Every Halloween there are quite a bit of Supergirls," she told Jimmy Kimmel, so it was worth the wait.

Melissa Benoist worked on her core strength

While comic book titans DC and Marvel have both made noise about introducing more diversity to their products, one thing that all superheroes have in common are incredible abs. Benoist's Supergirl is no exception. She told Entertainment Weekly that to prepare for the role, she did "some boxing, strength training, and a lot of core work." At Comic-Con, she said that her workouts included Pilates, boxing, and plyometrics.

If you've never had cause to get into superhero shape, you might be wondering what fresh hell plyometrics are. As Healthine explains, plyometrics involve exerting your body to its maximum ability for a short period of time — for example, by jumping — to improve strength, speed, and power. They're a pretty advanced form of exercise, as Benoist found out! On CBS's This Morning, she explained, "I did quite a bit of training. We did this stuff called plyometrics, which is like jump training. And all of it was really hard — just hard things!"

And the core work isn't just to look good. As Benoist added, the core work comes in handy when you're doing the flying stunts. "I'm up on a wire," she said, "and you have to hold your entire body weight so there's a lot of training involved."

Work is a workout on Supergirl

Melissa Benoist wasn't the only cast member who had to up her workout intensity to give the action sequences the effort they deserved. Chyler Leigh, who plays Kara's adoptive sister Alex, said that the actors work really hard with the stunt coordinators to get the fight scenes just right. And those action-packed days are full-on workouts in their own right. "When we do fight scenes, we're working out for six hours, just doing the same thing," she told CBS. "We are burnt for the next few days. I think that's really where I get my caloric burn count."

Even when they aren't shooting, Leigh and Benoist try to use those periods of waiting around that happen on the set of a TV show to stay in shape. "Melissa and I try to do as much as we possibly can," Leigh said. "In my trailer, I've got resistance bands and medicine balls and things like that. I try to do it in between, but we have very little downtime." The two on-screen sisters also have a shared interest in the same workout. "I love Pilates," Leigh told CBS. "It gives such a good core foundation. When I can go, it's awesome." And you thought TV sets were all craft services and hanging out in trailers.

Melissa Benoist learned to fight from the best

Thos Robinson/Getty Images Another crucial element of being a superhero is being able to kick butt convincingly. This didn't come naturally to Benoist, who confessed to the Chicago Tribune, "I had never punched anyone! I maybe slapped my sisters when I was a kid, but I'm not an aggressive, violent person, and I had no idea how to throw a punch." To help her find her inner fighter, Benoist took up boxing. "I definitely had to learn technique. Like how to actually punch someone and not hurt yourself more than you're hurting the person you're punching. And so boxing was part of it," she told InStyle.

Fortunately for Benoist, she had access to excellent tutors. In addition to the stunt team, former karate and kickboxing world champion Lexi Alexander (pictured above) directed an episode in the first season. Having worked on Supergirl's fellow Arrowverse show Arrow, Alexander said she was excited to work on a story about a female superhero. "I realized that this is the first time I'm choreographing and directing a fight scene for a female lead. I did some fight directing for a woman here and there … but for a female lead? I've never directed a female lead in an action," she told Den of Geek.

Her directing stint was short, but Alexander said that she pushed her star "to the next level of fight choreography," and that "they've now changed [Benoist's] fight style from [Alexander's] episode onward." Benoist might still be more lover than fighter at heart, but we wouldn't challenge her.

She does (some of) her own stunts on Supergirl

Believe it or not, it really is Benoist doing some of those hair-raising stunts on the show. The actress told Variety that she likes to get involved with the action when she can, saying, "I have been doing a lot [of stunts], and I want to keep doing them. Already I've fought a male on the show. Supergirl's fight moves are boxing. She's really heavy-handed. There's some flying that involves kicking and punching mid-flight that's kind of awesome."

However, not everyone was thrilled with Benoist's hands-on approach to fights. Her mom, Julie, told her that she found it difficult to watch her daughter's fight scenes, especially against men. But Julie Benoist needn't have worried. Benoist knows her limits, and she's heaped praise on her stunt doubles. In 2015, she said of stunts, "I think they're so fun. There are some that I just can't — I really could get injured. … My stunt double is amazing. She was Jen Garner's on Alias and Buffy's. She's all over the place, and she's so cool. I wish people could see what they go through. It's insane."

Benoist's stunt double in 2015 was Shauna Duggins, whose resume includes Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the recent Star Trek movies, and 2000's Charlie's Angels (as well as many other movies and shows.) After doing 20 episodes of Supergirl, Duggins went on to work as stunt coordinator for shows including Ray Donovan, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and GLOW. She's a real-life superwoman.

She likes to get out of the gym

Although Benoist diligently puts in her hours in the gym, the Colorado-raised actress is happier getting her exercise in the great outdoors. Her Instagram shows photos of her hiking with her husband (and Supergirl co-star), Chris Wood, and their dogs, Farley and Drift. She also recalled being jealous when she found out what her co-star and Supergirl predecessor, Helen Slater, was doing to get in shape.

After Benoist recounted the boxing and core work she was doing to Slater, "She gave me this look, and I was like, 'Why, what did they have you do?'" Benoist told Entertainment Weekly. "'Oh, I went horseback riding, and fencing and doing some archery, and I was swimming.' She went through this whole gamut of awesome outdoor activities that I would love to do to train." Speaking to E! Online, Benoist said of Slater's exercise regime, "She was on trampolines a lot and dancing and prancing and doing all these cool activities for training. I wish I had that much fun."

The conflicting training schedules aren't coming between the two actresses. Benoist added to EW, "Also, she's just so kind and such a sweet, sweet woman. That's really what I've learned from her. She really is a super girl. I'm so honored that I'm following in her footsteps." She'll just have to wait for a filming break to take a hike.

Melissa Benoist has a dance background

Glee was not Benoist's first experience with musical theater. She told Jimmy Kimmel that she did "tap, ballet, and jazz class at four years old" and children's theater, even performing at Disneyland. "In front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, we sang a Stephen Sondheim medley where my solo was 'Send in the Clowns,'" she recalled. She also studied ballet, although she wasn't a perfect student. "All the years I took ballet class … I was the one kid in class who the teacher was always like, 'Urgh, her turn-out,' and, 'She is not standing up straight,'" Benoist told Kimmel. She did better with another form of dance. In a video for Glamour, she said, "I have a secret superpower — that I can tap dance," and she demonstrated to prove her point.

That dance training comes in handy on the set of Supergirl — and not just for Benoist's part in the musical crossover episode of The Flash. Benoist said that her dance background helps her with the wire work and even the fight sequences. "With the wire work and flying, even the choreography, I grew up dancing, so that kind of came like it would if I were learning a dance routine," she told the Chicago Tribune. Plus, it keeps her and the crew entertained between takes.

She learned how to fly (well, on wires)

Melissa Benoist's favorite thing about her superhero role is exactly what you'd expect: the chance to fly. When Jimmy Kimmel asked about the best part of playing Supergirl, Benoist said, "I mean, I get to fly!" Upon further questioning, she acknowledged, "I mean it's hard work, I'm essentially attached to a fork in the air." She also told Variety just how hard it was and how she prepared, saying, "The wire work for training is mostly core work. It's mostly ab-centric — the whole area of the body that nobody wants to work out. You have to get strong. You have to carry your whole body weight when you're up in the air."

However, it's worth all the working out. "The wire work is really difficult, but so fun. And when you get it right, watching the result is exhilarating," Benoist told People. "It's a really, really cool feeling to know what it felt like, the energy I had to exert to create those flying scenes. And then the way they look is really rewarding."

Benoist got some help perfecting her flying technique. When Kimmel asked how she figured out Supergirl's flying style, she said, "There's this sort of superhero physicality school that you kind of have to go to — at least we did on the DC shows — where the stunt team will teach you to walk like a superhero. … They're awesome and they've really helped me." And that's how to look fly in spandex.

Benoist eats healthy, but she's not a dieter

All of that working out and on-set action builds up an appetite. But as a female superhero who's expected to squeeze into a spandex suit every day and have the muscles to beat up bad guys without actually looking bulked up, Benoist can't go to town on craft services. Fortunately, she's pretty into fruits and vegetables anyway. "I love supermarkets, I love grocery shopping, I love the produce aisle, because to be super you have to be healthy," she told Glamour. "And I would probably stock up on all the fruits. I love fruit."

However, she isn't about to totally deprive herself of comfort foods. In the same Glamour interview, she said, "If I could supersize any food it would be [an] ice cream Drumstick, vanilla caramel. They're so good." In 2016, she told the Chicago Tribune that she was excited to attend that year's Chicago Comic-Con and Entertainment Expo (aka C2E2) because she wanted to check out the city's restaurants. As she explained, "I've heard the food scene is incredible, and I'm a foodie, so I can't wait to go out and eat."

Benoist also said that her own partiality to the occasional junk food splurge inspired the writers to add it into her character's personality. "I love junk food, I love doughnuts, and they put that in there quite a bit," she said, laughing. "There are these doughnuts all the time." This diet sounds super.

She got ripped to show women being tough

Kevin Winter/Getty Images One reason Melissa Benoist was so invested in making sure her character could be physically impressive was because she wanted to inspire other women to feel strong and powerful. In an essay for Time, she wrote, "I think the more the show goes on, the more you see this fierceness and what women are really capable of. It puts [Supergirl] on this equal playing field. … That's so meaningful to me to help children understand that girls can have just as much fun as their male counterparts in the superhero world. It's about confidence and hope, and Supergirl really embodies all of that."

Even though Benoist also wrote that she grew up in "this really strong, feminine family," she told the Chicago Tribune, "I didn't really believe that I could be that character or play a superhero. It's something I never thought of myself as doing, but I just knew I had to go for it because there's so few female superheroes and just strong females that fight back and do it with grace and do it with love." She's also said that she didn't want the character to be a female version of male superheroes, saying, "What I think is cool is to try to bring kind of a femininity to her strength. … I do like the idea of bringing in like a grace to it. And a fluidity and kind of this femininity to flying. It's fun." In other words, Melissa Benoist is out here bringing new meaning to (Super)girl power.

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beatyoutothepunchline · 5 years

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On Getting Dressed

Getting dressed in the morning has always been difficult for me. If I can, I will wear the same outfit four times in one week to avoid having to think about it any longer than necessary. My go-to outfit at the moment is my green and black J-Crew plaid button-down, my high-waisted Madewell skinny jeans with the button fly and my Doc Martens. At this point in my life, I do not ask myself, “Do you think somebody will realize you’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for the last four days?” but, “Do these jeans look and smell clean enough that if someone were to realize you’ve been wearing them for the last four days, they wouldn’t call you out on it?” If the answer is yes, I will throw on the outfit again. I don’t dress to look nice most days. “Nice” meaning my makeup is done, my hair is straight and parts in a way that frames my face in a flattering way, my outfit is coordinated, cleaned and ironed and my shoes match the vibe I’m going for. When I look "nice" there is generally a vibe I am going for and that can vary day to day. A coat of concealer and a flat iron are nice, but it isn’t really necessary. Some days I run around Chicago in an oversized sweatshirt, with bags under my eyes and my naturally wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail. Sometimes I’m more dressed up, others I’m more dressed down. I’m most comfortable in jeans and a tee shirt and because I tend to get more done when I don’t feel like I’m sticking out for looking good or bad. There are certain days where I have to critically think about my wardrobe as I might an essay or an article for class--interviews, dates, holidays--and those days are agonizing. I would argue there is just as much nuance and subtext in the right outfit as there is in a Hemingway short story. Which is why most fashion related things go over my head. But every now and then, I force myself to stand in front of my closet and edit my wardrobe to what I wear. I’m not a person with many clothes, but there are always a few things I find I can get rid of. As I pick up each piece and I asked myself, “Is this still me?” I stopped to wonder, “How did this become my thing? Is it even my thing, or is it someone else’s?” Like most people, from birth till about I was old enough to make my own decision (and for those decisions to be preferably color coordinated, realistic, and weather/event appropriate), my clothing wasn’t my choice. So none of my clothes were my thing, rather what my mom thought would look cute on me. This is why there is a picture of me in an Angelina Ballerina tee shirts and pink capris with a fairy wand and crown on my fourth birthday, and a picture of me in fifth grade wearing a striped, pink white shirt and short sets from Old Navy while on our family trip to Hawaii, and why my first day of school photo from seventh grade I’m wearing a short sleeved and khaki jacket with a lacy pink tank top and black shorts. I can separate my current wardrobe, almost perfectly into black, white, denim, olive green, and varying shades of blue. I have one pink sweater (which my mother bought me) and while I will occasionally throw it on and wear it around my apartment, I end up tearing it off within twenty minutes because of the I cannot stand the color or cut of it. The reason I wear the monochrome is because I am pale and my skin has a naturally pink undertone. If you flip my wrist over, you can see every vein in my arm up to my elbow. You can see the veins in my feet, in my thighs and my stomach. Wearing, black, white, denim, olive and shades of blue makes the pinkish undertone is less noticable and helps the bright blue veins blend in better. Wearing pink, or bright yellow washes me out and makes weird details intense. As for the cut of it, it’s a cropped sweater with side splits up to my ribcage, on top of being wildly ineffective at keeping me warm, it makes my long torso appear even longer than it is, and it just isn’t me. Nothing in my wardrobe is really “me” though. I came to this realization after glancing at the mess of clothes scattered across my bedroom floor while taking a “break” from spring cleaning this last weekend. Everything in my closet I own because of someone else. I own a pair of Gold Cup Sperry Topsiders because my freshman year of high school there was a senior boy with a British accent who browsed the bookshelves of the library before school in a pair of Sperry’s. In the era of Victoria Secret yoga pants tucked into beat to hell Ugg boots and calf-length Nike socks slipped thoughtlessly into pairs of ADIDAS shower slides on the way out the door, his shoes, as well as the pressed khaki pants and button-down shirts, his perfectly gelled hair, and his accent, captured a kind of class that seemed lost on the rest of the students at my high school. Though my own Sperry’s seem to more closely resemble some douchebag college frat guys than the classy look of Boat Shoe Guy’s, when I look of them I think back to being fourteen, working up the guts to sit at his table in the library, not quite brave enough to say anything, and listening to him talk in what I later found out was a fake British accent about things I can’t remember with other, older people and feeling cool. Not in a conventional way. Cool in a nerdy way I didn’t realize I could be until I met him. When I look at the gold hoop earrings I keep in my great grandmother’s teacup with the rest of my small jewelry collection, I realize that my love for them comes from mother, who wore perfect silver hoops earrings frequently throughout my childhood. When I think of them I think of box blonde hair, and regrettable bangs and her capped tooth smile. I’m the opposite. My hair is dirty blonde, I don’t have bangs (never again after my mom cut thick ones so far back on my head that for several months I had Joe Dirt’s mullet). My hoops aren’t perfect circles and they are gold color, not silver.I don’t look or act much like my mother, but occasionally when I put them on I feel like I can fake that same kind of magnetic charm and try to smile with my teeth like she does. I decide I can pull off the hoops, but not the toothy grin and leave it at that. I own a black pea coat because of the movie Giant. Which doesn’t seem like it would make sense give it’s a movie set in Marfa, Texas, but let me explain. My freshman year of high school my grandma bought a copy of Giant for my dad’s birthday and one day a few weeks after she’d given it to him, I found it lying on the buffet in our living room. Being the movie buff I am, and being intregued by the front cover I decided to watch it. The entire time I just kept thinking the blond guy from the front cover was cute (which, in retrospect, is the dumbest take away a person could have after watching that film). After the movie I decided to Google him and came upon a picture of him walking down the rainy street in New York City. Wet cigarette hanging out of his mouth, collar of his iconic black black pea coat poped. And Where I can’t say I’ve ever fallen in love at first sight, I imagine it’s similar to seeing James Dean in that jacket. In an excerpt from ‘Women in Clothes,’ an anthology about how clothes define and shape us, Leanne Shapton, author and artist, writes of a similar love-at-first-sight feeling she with an Isabel Marant dress she saw a woman wearing at a party, “I admired her hair: worn loose, flecked with grey. And her manner: warm, thoughtful, sincere. She wore no makeup, and the dress, which was sack-like, lent her a modesty I liked. We spoke about our children. Then, in a lull in the conversation, I came back to the dress, complimenting it again. She nodded, knowing. Then I did something that surprised me: I leaned down and picked up the edge of her skirt and touched it, marveling aloud at the light, smooth fabric. I have never touched another woman’s dress like that before. A fur sleeve once, but I’ve never had that grasping, clutching impulse.” In her essay, Sharpton wonders if her feelings she had about the dress “also had something to do with admitting I want something. I’ve struggled with admitting what I want most of my life, not admitting until the last possible moment that I wanted a child. Admitting I flat-out wanted this dress was new to me. I was nervous.” Where I can’t say I relate to the wanting a kid portion of that statement, I can relate to the feeling of wanting something. Wanting to be unique and confident, two feelings I don’t feel like I’ve ever fully had but have just been chasing after my whole life. The reason my go-to outfit is what it is is because of directors like Sofia Coppola and Point Break era, Kathryn Bigelow. There is this picture of Kathryn Bigelow standing in front of a monitor next to Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze: white tee shirt, baggy blue jeans, cool boxy shades, and a Reebok baseball hat. When I don’t know what to wear, or when I need to do something I’m not sure I can, I dress up and pretend to be somebody I think can figure it out. Be the woman who can direct a surfer bank heist movie, the woman who can speak French, beautifully while eating a croissant, scarlet lips pouted, Rick Blaine tripping over his shit, the Dude who’s got no idea how the hell things are going to work out, but isn’t too worried about it. Cause maybe things just will in the end. It isn’t an exact copy, it looks similar enough to them that I’m able to capture their attitude, power. . . their magic, but different enough that it’s still me. So I put on my version of that outfit when I don’t know what else to wear because it is comfortable and easy and because I’ve tricked myself into thinking it will inspire some sort of brilliant direction and confidence I don’t feel like I have on my own. Even if it doesn’t do what I think it will and my voice gets caught in my throat and I let someone talk over me, or I get rejected, or I fail and fall flat on my face. When I wear my navy Calvin Klein wrap dress, everyone I know groans and says, “You wear that all the time. Don’t you own another dress?” I do. There is the ombre floor length prom dress that lives back of my closet at my parent's house which I bought because it made me look like Jennifer Aniston, and the crochet white and orange dress that I bought from Urban Outfitter’s because it reminded me of Shasta Fay Hepworth’s orange dress in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. I don’t usually have the occasion to wear either of these dresses, but the navy wrap dress works for almost any occasion so that’s why I wear it. It creates some shape on my fairly shapeless form, and I like it because it makes me feel like Lauren Bacall. Equal parts sexy, mysterious and classy in a way that I am otherwise not. I’ve never worn it on a date, but I’d be lying if I said if I’d never worn it to a half hour meeting to look “nice” only to walk around downtown Chicago just to see people turn their heads and wonder, “Who is she?” Then, for a fraction of a second, I am the woman I’m not to somebone. When I am at home on Saturday mornings, and my hair is all frizzed out and drooled on and I can’t be bothered to put on actual pants, I walk around in my boxers, oversized and stained Sid’s Liquor tee shirt and a cardigan. I throw on some sunglasses, debate making myself a White Russian and go full-on “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski. Cause it’s hard to relax when you live and work in the same place and I can only seem to do it when I’m someone else. But it is me? Dressing up as someone else might get me through the day, but what if I never take risks as myself? Years from now, will there be some girl who sees a pair of Madewell skinny jeans at the bottom of a pile at a thrift store or finds an old pair of boots that will say, “Oh my god, I love it. It’s so Sidney Thompson.” if I can’t even dress up like her? Am I just a shot for shot remake with nothing new to offer, to contribute, to inspire? Will people see me or will they tease my style apart and say, “Oh, she’s ripping off So-and-So.” I’d like to think I’m more of a Quentin Tarantino homage to all my favorite fashion icons. You can see where I stole, but I’d like to think every now and then there’s someone out there is able to see that part of me poking through one of my costumes and thinks it’s pretty cool.

#essays #theblondefiasco #writing

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spaceorphan18 · 7 years

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Glee’s Final Season [Part 2/4]

Dedicated to @ckerouac and everyone who gave me prompts. This was getting long, so I decided to break it up into four parts - which I’ll post one every evening. :)

For context - This set of episodes takes place five years after the events of season six (effectively season 11??) and ends around the time that the real series finale ends. It is mostly canon compliant – though I did take liberty with a few things, most notably, changing Sam and Mercedes’s story. But for the most part, it should settle in nicely into regular canon – and its intent is that this is my own version of the final season of the show.

Also note: I’m not that great at picking out music for these episodes, so feel free to fill in those blanks yourselves ;)

Previously on Glee:

Part 1

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Episode 11.7: Drinking the Kool Aid

Kurt, Blaine, Rachel and Santana decide to visit Quinn. Kurt and Blaine are wanting to see if she’s still offering to donate eggs for their baby. Santana and Rachel find it skeptical, but Kurt and Blaine recount how in college Quinn offered. Rachel offers her own eggs, to which Santana makes a million jokes, but Kurt and Blaine are a little hesitant about that.

Quinn has a nice place on Long Island. When they meet her - she’s acting a little weird (which Santana points out right away). Everything about the house is too neat and clean and quiet, and Quinn is acting like she’s forty-six, not twenty-six. Quinn give a run down of her life - she’s a real estate agent with a good firm, still married to Puck, and living the life she always wanted. Kurt and Blaine are ask about the egg donation - to which Quinn replies a little hastily yes, as long as she’s paid. A middle-aged Hispanic woman comes in, and yells at Quinn about not keeping quiet. Quinn waves her of as a cleaning lady, but the lady bites back that she is no cleaning lady, and Quinn better know her place.

That’s when Santana tells her to spill it -- so Quinn does. Quinn’s actually the older woman’s house cleaner, she’s allowed room and board if she keeps the place clean. She and Puck have been divorced for a couple of years - after he took off on her. Quinn wanted children, but Puck did not -- claiming he was going to end up like his dad. She lost her job due to lay offs, and has been struggling ever since. Kurt and Blaine apologize for coming - but Quinn says she’d still like to help if possible. She still keeps in touch with Shelby (Rachel’s mom), and Beth is doing great. Quinn says she knows that she’ll never be a real mother, but if she can help give the world children to caring parents, then it’s worth it. Quinn officially agrees to donate eggs, and Kurt and Blaine say they’ll pay her.

They, however, still need a surrogate. Rachel offers again - but Santana claims that Rachel’s too selfish to do that. Kurt and Blaine take her up on her offer.

As a post-wedding present, Brittany gives Mercedes a voucher for a free yoga class recommended to her by her coworker Mary Hollaran. Brittany, Mercedes, and Tina go - only to find that everyone in the class is way too happy. They find that the key to this happiness is some Stanley Kubric-esque mind control videos they are forced to watch before doing the yoga. Brittany thinks there’s nothing wrong with this, but Mercedes and Tina decide that they’d rather not be apart of the strange cult-like yoga class.

And meanwhile, still, Artie and Sam get addicted to a virtual reality game all weekend, and don’t even notice that everyone’s been gone for two days.

Episode 11.8: Freak the Freak Out

Rachel tells Jesse about wanting to be a surrogate. She thought he’d be upset -- but he’s fine with it. The producers of her show, however, are less than enthused. She just started her show, and now she’s going to have to leave it after a few months, breaking a contract. Rachel tries to tell them that she can come back after she’s given birth, but they aren’t as open-minded about it. Rachel then has doctor’s appointments - and when they start to tell her how her body is going to change, she begins to get cold feet about the whole thing.

Rachel then takes a trip with Blaine -- he and Kurt are redecorating and slowly looking at baby related things. Blaine also takes a moment to tell her that he knows this is a big decision for her, not to rush - there are other options, and that they won’t feel bad if she decides to bow out. Rachel tells him he’s going to make a wonderful dad. Blaine then tells him, he’s a little nervous about it -- he thought he’d always be the one ready to go, but Kurt’s the one taking charge in everything, and he’s a little nervous, too. Rachel tells him they’ll be nervous together - and says that she’s fully in.

Mercedes confides in Kurt that her second album is doing extremely well -- so well that her label has asked if she wants to do a three month national tour. She really does but she says she isn’t sure how Sam will take it - especially since he has a job that he can’t up and leave. Kurt tells her that marriage is hard -- he definitely know, but to talk to Sam. He’s sure he’ll be more open minded about it than she thinks. Later - Mercedes does come clean to Sam, and he’s more than supportive, even if he’s being honest, and is a little scared as well. Mercedes feels better about it, and decides to tell her producer that she’ll be going on tour.

Kitty’s in town and meets up with Artie, Tina, Santana and Brittany. They all go out clubbing. Tina gets super drunk and ends up making out with a girl - to which she freaks out about. Santana and Brittany take her home, where Tina decides she needs to reevaluate her entire life. Santana says she’s doesn’t have to -- because Tina is probably not gay (though Brittany is excited about the idea of another bi-corn), but experimenting, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Meanwhile, Artie and Kitty have a nice time where they catch up - and Artie learns that she’s married and has a kid. Artie’s a little surprised by this, thinking he was gonna probably hook up with her that night, but Kitty says she just wanted to see how he was doing. And while the encounter goes well, Kitty mentions that they’re fundamentally different in that she’s, deep down, someone who wants a more stable life, and Artie’s always going to be a player -- to which Artie feels like he needs to reevaluate his life’s choices.

Episode 11.9: Dance, Dance Resolution

Blaine, Sam, Artie, and Tina take a trip down to Chicago to see Mike. Mike’s doing choreography for a new ballet - and is excited for everyone to come see it. While they’re there - they catch up with Mike -- Sam talks about how he’s going to cope with Mercedes leaving, Artie talks about trying to find inspiration for a new film idea he’s toying with, Blaine talks about the idea of becoming a father, and Tina laments that her life isn’t really going anywhere.

Later, not able to sleep, Tina is up, and Mike joins her. Tina puts forth that maybe they should hook but, but Mike doesn’t think that’s a good idea, to which Tina asks why not. Mike, while he admits he’s single, doesn’t think that she should run back to him every time her life isn’t turning out the way she wants it to. Tina knows he’s right, she’s just tired of being the one not going anywhere. Mike opens up a little - stating that he isn’t sure what he’s doing either, but is just enjoying life as it comes. And offers some advice to Tina - that instead of living in the future, she needs to live more in the present. Tina thanks him - and says she does need to stop comparing herself to everyone else and focus on how awesome she is (to which Mike agrees - she is awesome.)

The next day, after the ballet -- Tina notices that there’s a ballerina who looks just like her. When she goes to check it out a little more, she runs smack dab into an incredibly handsome guy, who introduces himself as Jon. The two talk for a few moments, before Tina blurts out that she’d like to get some coffee. Jon agrees to the date.

Meanwhile, Mercedes begins auditioning girls for backup dancers (with the help of Rachel and Brittany and Mercedes’s choreographer Lynn), things get out of control when one of the producers starts making choices that go against the what Mercedes wants.

And after a few rejected auditions, Kurt decides he needs help with his dancing. Since Santana is the only one available, she offers to give him some tips.

Episode 11.10: The Greatest Adventure in the History of Basic Cable

Due to some major snafu somewhere, all the lights in New York City go out. And these are the stories of those stuck in the blackout.

Story 1: Tina and Brittany -- Brittany was coming to visit Tina at work, and because Tina’s TV station is right near where Brittany films her Youtube show. Often times they head out to dinner together after work, and this being a Monday night, they were both headed to Rachel’s. Except the lights go out - and everyone is advised to stay in the building. Tina is freaking out - because she doesn’t like the dark, and because she’s missing Skying with her new long distance boyfriend Jon. Brittany, however, thinks the whole thing is delightful - and gets the staff to engage in a game to pass the time -- one where they break into teams, and have to act out old sitcoms that people have to guess. Tina is reluctant to get involved first, but when she finds she is super good at guessing old TV shows, she’s the most enthused person there.

Story 2: Rachel and Artie: Rachel and Artie are in Rachel’s apartment when the lights go out. It’s a little awkward - then Artie suggests they light candles. As they do so, Rachel kind of haphazardly talks about her show, but Artie is strangely quiet. After settling in and sitting there quietly - Artie remarks that he and Rachel aren’t really friends. Rachel says sure they are - and recounts the time they went off to find his laptop together. Artie reminds her that it’s been five years since then, and says that she probably can’t even tell him his birthday. It’s true but Rachel doesn’t remember most people’s birthdays. Artie says that if they didn’t have mutual friends, then they would have never spoken past high school. Rachel says that’s fair - but there’s no reason they can’t get to know each other better now.

They decide to play a game of get-to-know-me. Artie starts sometimes he wonders if he’s not good at being in relationships and confides that what Kitty told him when she was in town shook him a little. Rachel admits that she often feels insecure, too, sometimes worries that she’ll wake up one day and still be that loser she was in high school. Artie confides in her that he sometimes feels like that too - and how it’s weird that even being adults, there are parts of who you were in high school that haunt you. After they’ve gotten into more conversation, Rachel tells him that she has a secret - and because Artie is there, and they’re now real friends, she’ll tell him first.

Story 3: Blaine and Santana -- Blaine and Santana are coming home on the subway. Santana is annoyed at Blaine because he might have had a client lined up for her (a coworker of his) but he backed out last minute - and Santana blames Blaine for it. Blaine blames her bad attitude. The two are argumentative as the blackout occurs.

They’re stuck in the subway car with an elderly couple, who finds them a cute couple even when fighting. Santana, finding it amusing, jumps on the lie, and claims that Blaine is her husband, to which Blaine rolls his eyes, but doesn’t refute. The elderly couple says they might be able to help with their problems, and Blaine says he doesn’t think so. They ask how they met, and Santana sarcastically recounts the time Blaine met her on a staircase and how he knew they were destined to fall in love. Knowing that he’s being mocked, Blaine hits her right back, stating that they then they had a ton of meaningless sex because Santana doesn’t know how to deal with her feelings. The elderly couple don’t seem to be discourage and continue to inquiry about their issues.

Blaine says he does not understand why she’s so upset - and Santana says that she need to find work soon. Blaine tells her that if she’d be a little more of a planner and less of a fly by the seat of her pants person, then maybe she’d be in a more secure position, to which Santana tells him he really needs to let loose every once in a while - and if he thinks he’s going to be a decent dad, he’s gonna have to learn to take whatever curveballs life throws at him.

The elderly couple recount their own differences, and say that their marriage has worked because they learned how to complement and support each other. Blaine relents first, and says he’ll still help her find a new client - and get organized. Santana reluctantly gives in and tells him that while she still thinks he could relax a bit, he’ll still make a good dad. The elderly couple tell them they know they’ll be together for a long time - to which Blaine and Santana have a good laugh, though don’t correct them.

Story 4: Kurt and Sam -- Kurt and Sam are stuck in the elevator of Rachel’s building. Kurt, who can’t believe he’s in this situation again, takes a seat and gets out a magazine from his bag. Sam, however, is freaking out a little and tries to get out. Kurt consoles him - telling him they’ll be fine. Sam wants to know how he��s so sure all the air won’t leave or something. Kurt tells him about what being locked in that elevator was like - and even though there’s no bathroom, it’s not such a bad experience.

Sam asks Kurt to talk about that time -- that he’s only seen Blaine’s fictional version of it in script form, but he’s never heard them talk about the experience. So Kurt recounts the story - about how Sue kidnapped them, but it wasn’t so bad. Kurt discovered how deeply he loved Blaine that night -- and while he’s always known Blaine was the one he’d want to be with -- that night confirmed that they could survive anything together. Sam thinks that’s sweet - but is still feeling edgy, and wishes Mercedes was there to calm him down. Kurt asks what Mercedes would do to do that -- and Sam says that she sometimes sings to her. So, Kurt sings him a song, and Sam relaxes.

Story 5: Mercedes and Jesse -- Mercedes and Jesse were the ones getting the Monday night dinner, and were on their way back home when the lights went out. Because they can’t take the subway, they decide to brave walking back home in complete darkness. There are some strange things going on around them, noises they aren’t really sure of, but they decide to continue on. Not all of the journey back is scary -- there’s a street performer playing a sax, which a group of people huddled around him, a bunch of local business offering walkers a safe place to go during the blackout, and - as Jesse points out -- for the first time ever, he can see the stars over New York, and it’s a beautiful sight. They make it home alright, and even dinner hasn’t cooled off completely. And Jesse and Mercedes look back and can always say they remember the day when the stars came out.

The lights are eventually turned back on, and everyone makes it back to Rachel’s apartment just fine. Tina and Brittany have a new game to play, Jesse and Mercedes talk about the stars, Blaine and Santana pretend their married (to the confusion of Kurt and Brittany) and Kurt talks about how he needs to avoid elevators from now on. Rachel says she’s happy they’re all there - all of her friends (including Artie!) and reveals her news -- that she’s been to the doctor to confirm -- she’s pregnant!

Episode 11.11: None of Your Business

With the popularity of Jane Austen Sings! Rising, Rachel ends up in the tabloids more than usual. There are numerous reports of her questionable behavior, along with accounts of her beginning to look fatigued and gaining weight. Rachel mostly ignores them until one reporter starts to follower her around, and takes snapshots of her and Kurt coming out of a baby clothing store and publishes that she’s having an affair with Kurt - and that she’s pregnant. She yells at the reporter, who followers her for more of a scoop, telling him that it’s none of his business what’s going on -- but that only fuels speculation.

Santana nags at her that she should step in (again) and help clear her image. Rachel thinks she can control it, until after a show one night, instead of fans, she’s bombarded with press. Rachel hires Santana to clear things up. Santana invites select press into Rachel’s home (even though Rachel isn’t thrilled about it) so they can do a piece on how loving she is -- and the gang goes overboard telling the press how wonderful she is. Rachel also let’s lip that she is indeed pregnant, which is what everyone really wants to hear.

More speculation about the affair rumors circulate. This time Kurt and Blaine step in to let Rachel know it’s okay to talk to the press about it (now that it’s been enough time). The announcement that she’s carrying the baby for her friends wins her favor of the public - and sales pick up even more for Jane Austen Sings! Due to the fact that Rachel will only be with the role for a limited time. Rachel even learns there’s Tony speculation - and gets excited.

Meanwhile, Blaine begins production on his musical Trapped in an Elevator: A Love Story. It begins to take up a lot of his time, and he starts to notice that Kurt’s acting a little different -- he seems more distant and not as happy as usual. Amid all the rumors swirling around Kurt and Rachel, Blaine thinks he should talk to Kurt about it - but Kurt tells him he’s fine.

Elliott comes back into town, and Kurt and Elliott begin to spend more time together - lifting Kurt’s mood a bit. Blaine doesn’t think much of it, until the same reporters thinking Kurt and Rachel were having an affair are now spotting Kurt and Elliott frequeting an old theater together. Blaine, wanting the full story, confronts Kurt about it. While Blaine doesn’t think Kurt’s cheating on him, he does think there’s something else going on - and Kurt admits there is.

Kurt takes Blaine to the old theater -- it’s just the two of them, as the place has been run down for years. Kurt admits that he’s been having a little bit of a hard time -- Blaine’s got his show, and he has his fashion line, and they both have a baby coming, but he misses performing. So - he has been talking to Elliott about a particular opportunity. He wants to renovate the old theater and make it their own. Blaine, a little skeptical, says he isn’t sure they can afford a theater - but that’s when Kurt says they have a wealthy backer - April Rhodes. She’s the one who owns the theater - and will basically pay them to open it and run it and produce shows to be in it. Kurt says he knows it’s a little bit of a gamble, but it could mean a more secure life for them and their baby down the road. But he won’t make any final plans unless Blaine’s completely on board. Blaine says that he is most definitely on board, as it’s something that they can build together.

[As the show ends, the two share a kiss on the empty stage - and Blaine jokingly asks if Kurt’s more open to sex on the stage now.]

Episode 11.12: Truth Be Told

On her webshow, Brittany reveals some personal truths about her and Santana’s life - including some things that Santana preferred to keep quiet - including the fact that she’s having trouble keeping work. Santana and Brittany argue about it - and Brittany isn’t sure why Santana is so upset since she talks about all of it in the open, and all the time. Santana explains that there’s a difference between personal discussions and public discussion - because Brittany doesn’t seem to know the difference. Brittany tells Santana she shouldn’t be ashamed of who she is - or that sometimes she needs help.

Santana stays mad until she’s approached by a representative of a feminist group - a proactive group that lends itself to young girls in need - who would like Santana to be an official spokesperson for the group. They’re offering a lofty and secure job, to which Santana has a hard time saying no to. Brittany is excited for her - but Santana tells her that while this whole thing worked in her favor, that she wants Brittany to promise that no more secrets be revealed on the show anymore - to which Brittany agrees. Brittany then has Santana on the show to use it as a platform to talk about the new group she’s representing.

Tina’s long distance boyfriend Jon comes to New York and has dinner with Artie and Artie’s new girlfriend Linda. Everything is fine until afterwards when Artie confronts Tina that he doesn’t think Jon is a very good boyfriend because he seems more interested in his work than her, while Tina tells Artie that she thinks Linda is only interested in Artie’s work as a filmmaker because she’s an actress. The two come to blows over it - and decide that they just need to spend more time away from each other.

The more Mercedes plans for her tour, the more Sam feels like he’s being left behind. Sam feels guilty for wanting more attention - especially when this a big thing for her, but Mercedes says she understands - because they’ll be a part for months, and she admits to him that as much as she’s excited for the tour - she’s going to miss him incredibly. Mercedes promises to make some Sam time each day before she leaves, and that no matter where she is, he’ll always be with her.

Kurt, Blaine, Rachel, and Jesse play a couples game to see which couple knows each other better - and they all find out there are still some things about the other one that they never knew.

Episode 11.13: Girls in Bikinis, Boys Doin’ The Twist

Brittany is out Christmas shopping when she sees Vice President Sue Sylvester sneaking into a hotel with a man. She goes home to tell Santana - who doesn’t believe her. They stake out the hotel, and confirm it’s Sue - and Santana sees that the guy is a well known Democrat Senator. Santana wants to spy on her to see if she can get any good blackmail going - when Rachel hears about the plan and wants in. Santana does think she’s in any place to be stealthy, but Rachel insist that they go. They manage to sneak into the hotel alright, but are eventually caught by secret service. Sue, however, recognizes them hauls them into the the hotel room. Sue wants to know what’s going on - and Brittany lets slip that they were planning to blackmail her. Sue claims there’s nothing interesting going on other than she’s trying to work across the aisle to get legislation passed for people with disabilities. Santana doesn’t necessarily believe that’s the full story - but they leave anyway.

Meanwhile, Tina confronts Artie to make a truce. She tells him that she hates fighting with him, especially since he’s been avoiding her. Artie reluctantly tells her that she was right - that his now ex-girlfriend Linda was using him to get in his newest film. They begin to talk, and Tina admits, that while her long distance relationship is going fine, her life feels hollow without him in it. Arite tells her that he’s missed her, too - and the two of them make up. Artie then tells Tina about a film he’s writing. The lead role was originally written for Mercedes, but since she’s leaving, Artie wondered if she would take it on. Tina agrees.

Blaine takes Kurt to their theater - where he’s says he’s giving Kurt his Christmas present early. The stage is decorated with fake snow and a Christmas tree, and a picnic layed out for the two of them to enjoy. Blaine says with all the change happening in their life, and because next year won’t be the same, he wanted to share a few special moments with Kurt just the two of them. Kurt’s touched, and says while he’s happy where their life is headed - he wants to enjoy just he and Blaine a little while longer, too. He joins Blaine on stage where the two of them quietly enjoy their meal, and their company.

Sam throws Mercedes a Christmas-slash-Tour-Kick-Off 60’s themed party - where everyone shows up to do a gift exchange, and where Mercedes goes around the room and tells everyone that she loves them and goodbye (for a short while). Afterwards, Mercedes and Sam have their own special moment together.

On her way home, Santana spots Sue again at the hotel, and this time she notices Sue give the senator a quick kiss. Santana’s quick to take a snapshot - happy to finally have some leverage with Sue - and knows some young girls who would benefit from having a generous benefactor such as Sue. Santana wishes herself a Merry Christmas as the episode ends.

///

Part 3 Part 4 AO3 - FULL

#s.o. writes things #glee's final season #i'm still loving how this is turning out #feel free to add music as you will!

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ecsundance · 4 years

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A very Long (yet very awesome) Week of Sundance

Organisers of Sundance say in Tryon’s discussion that “If a filmmaker wants to create his or her own idiosyncratic vision, it’s often not worth looking around for a big budget, waiting for others to say it’s okay to make it. You have to stand up and make the film yourself…” (pg.164) and Kevin MacDonald in Tryon’s discussion talks about how basically all you need to make a movie is a laptop and a video camera, and how amazing it is that we live in a time which we can do this (pg.156)

This is similar to the idea that you can complain about not having enough time or experience to do something, but if you get over yourself and do it either you fail and learn, or you succeed and gain confidence. If you have a great idea then nothing should hold you back from making it a reality. Movies with billions of dollars behind them have fallen flat. So it stands to reason that a movie made on weekends with only a couple bucks could be amazing.

According to Chuck Tryon’s discussion of “Reinvented Festivals” (pg. 160), because there are a lot more independent bloggers/critics now due to newspapers not hiring many, there is a consistent stream of new reviews being released even minutes after a film finishes premiering.

Taking part in this class and festival and constantly thinking about what I thought about a film plays into this as I (along with my classmates) were some of the first to review some of these films. It’s such a fun experience to think and talk about film as everyone will have various ways of perceiving and connecting to each film.

Favourite Film From the Festival

It feels hard to choose a favourite because there were so many incredible films which affected me in different ways like Coda, How it Ends, Flee, and honestly most of the films I saw in this year's festival . However, I fell in love with The World to Come when it wasn’t even a movie I initially planned on seeing.

The world to come felt like a poem. It made my heart ache deeply, marinating in feelings of melancholic love, and unexpected loss. Maybe it hit me especially hard because I lost one of the most amazing people I’ve ever had in my life along with family and pets (since they are family too) since the start of Covid: I have regrets and things I never got to say. Maybe it’s because I’m fiercely fighting with my own identities right now. Either way, it was hard to watch. Parts of it still haunt me and still leave me breathless on the brink of tears. It struck a chord in me which I have a hard time fully putting to words. I didn’t originally even want to watch this film, it somehow ended up on my list of on demand films, and my mom convinced me to watch it (and I’m so glad she did).

It is a story which about two women which takes place in the 1800s, together in their loneliness who fall for each other behind their husbands’ backs. They secretly rendezvous in the forest and tucked away corners of their homes when their husband’s are working. It is beautiful in story and dialogue; it doesn’t get stale. It feels modern somehow, though it is set in the 19th century, and I’m still processing it all to figure out why exactly.

Least Favorite Film from the Festival...

Eight for Silver by Sean Ellis wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it was certainly not the best; I would not actively choose to watch this again. It had interesting concepts such as only natural lighting being used throughout the film and those turned into the werewolf emerging, negatively changed, from the dead animal. The movie would have gotten 4 stars rather than 3 from me simply by not having a CGI werewolf (unless it was so brilliantly terrifying and amazing it had to be shown) and by keeping the original plot of the Roma’s spells/curses (fueled from the massacre which the targeted village caused). The scarecrow and buried teeth, and the strange dreams which followed were such a great piece, but they just fell away more and more. The addition of the religious text (which mentions 30 pieces of silver is unnecessary, and just recycles old vampire movies/myth ) took this film from a great timepiece and cheapened it in combination with the subpar CGI creature, while also making it feel far too Hollywood in a bad way. Again, some of the ideas, like the person within the wolf were great, but they could have kept it that way and not shown the monster otherwise.

A list of All Feature Films I Saw:

During the 2021 Sundance film festival I have seen and rated the following:

Coda ***** Sian Heder

The story of a teenage hearing girl who wants to be a singer living with her otherwise deaf family who run a fishing boat.

Cryptozoo **** Dash Shaw

A woman’s attempt to protect mythical creatures in a world where everyone wants to harm them or use them as weapons.

Misha and the wolves ***** Sam Hobkinson

A chilling documentary about holocaust tale with a twist.

Users **** Natalia Amada

A mother’s view of the world, global warming, technology, her children and the relationship between all of this.

Prisoners of Ghostland **** Sion Sono

Samurai meets the gunslinger Western World in this colourful action-horror (featuring Nicholas Cage).

Censor **** Prano Bailey-Bond

The story of a woman whose sister disappeared as a child and how her job as a horror film censor helps her uncover the truth.

How it ends ***** Daryl Wein, Zoe Lister-Jones

A walk through the last day on Earth with a woman and her younger self as they make peace with their lives, relationships with others, and their own inner selves.

Strawberry Mansion ***** Dan Deacon

A dreamy/nightmarish surreal tale of a dream tax collector as he falls in love with the younger version of his client.

Cusp ***** Isabel Bethencourt, Parker Hill

A documentary on the lives of teen girls in Texas which delves into rape culture, poverty, and what it’s like to be a young woman.

Eight for Silver *** Sean Ellis

Werewolf lore set in the 19th century.

John and the Hole **** Pascual Sisto

A young teenage boy puts his family in a hole in the woods as he tries to deal with the stressors of being a kid and what adulthood holds, entwined with fable.

R#J ***** Carey Williams

A modern retelling of Shakespear’s Romeo and Juliet through the age of social media, with a twist or two.

Coming Home in the Dark ***** James Ashcroft

A horror story of a family who are abducted by two strangers who they later learn they share a deeper, darker history with.

We’re All Going to The World’s Fair **** Jane Schoenbrun

A showing of loneliness and desperation through an online roleplaying game and it’s after effects.

First Date **** Manuel Crosby, Darren Knapp

A story of a first date gone VERY wrong.

The World to Come ***** Mona Fastvold

A 19th century story of the growing connection between two farmhouse wives.

Violation ***** Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli

A film about a woman’s trauma and how she… Deals with it.

Marvelous and the Black Hole ***** Kate Tsang

A story about how a young teen girl gets through the loss of her mother through forming a connection with a local magician.

The Blazing World ***** Carlson Young

A traumatised young woman tries to bring her sister back from “the other side” but must really fight her own inner demons.

Mayday ***** Karen Cinorre

A story of a young woman overcoming trauma and fighting back against the man in a dreamlike state.

Night of the Kings **** Philippe Lacote

A new storyteller is anointed in a prison run by its inmates and he must keep telling these stories until the moon sets to stay alive. (It helps to understand the specific culture more with this one, otherwise it sort of goes over your head.)

Life in a Day 2021 ***** Kavin Macdonald

A grounding compilation of scenes from across the world on the same day, July 25th, with scenes one after the other which either connect or contrasted in an impactful way.

Flee ***** Jonas Poher Rasmussen

A biography told through animation of a young gay immigrant.

Short Films

Bj’s Mobile Gift Shop- Jason Park

A story of a young guy in Chicago who makes money to support himself and his grandparents by running a mobile gift shop out of a large suitcase.

Flex - Josefin Malmen, David Strindberg

A visual telling of a bodybuilder rubber-banding between insecurity and self obsession through surreal imagery and dialogue.

The Affected- Rikke Gregersen

A retelling of a college student preventing the deportation of a man back to Afghanistan through the interactions of the bystanders.

You Wouldn’t Understand- Trish Harnetiaux

A time-warp involving a picnic, a strange character looking for “horsey sauce” and a grocery store clerk armed with a food scanner.

Animations

Ghost Dogs- Joe Cappa

A family's new dog is “haunted” by the family’s many deceased dogs in squishy colourful 90s/early 2000s style animated short.

GNT- Sara Hirner, Rosemary Vasquez-Brown

A woman obsessed with social media tries to make yeast infections popular.

Trepanation- Nick Flaherty

A showing of depression through a disturbing hole ridden entity emerging from a hole and taking the place of the house's owner.

Little Miss Fate- Joder Von Rotz

A cleaning bird interrupts the fate of a couple going out on a date, leading to disastrous consequences.

Indie Series

I had really wanted to see Seeds of Deceit by Miriam Guttman and Would you Rather by Lise Akoka, (I tried viewing 4 Feet High by María Belén Poncio and Rosario Perazolo Masjoan but there was an issue which Sundance staff never got back to me about, sadly) but I ran out of time.

However, I did see These Days by Adam Brookes which takes place in New York City during Covid, showing a young woman living alone and how she survives living alone and being unable to work as a dancer.

New Frontier Experiences

Sadly, I kept thinking I’d have endless time. I did not engage in the New Frontier experience except for in class on one occasion. I think it was a great idea and fantastic opportunity and I regret not planning my time better for this specifically.

Talks or Events

Ignite x Adobe featured shorts films from artists aged 18 to 25 and was very inspiring since I’m in the age range of these artists.

A few I especially enjoyed were Vigincita, Personals, and Joychild (Although I honestly enjoyed the whole compilation).

Virgincita - A sexual coming of age/ look at mother daughter relationship mixed with religion.

Personals - A sexual encounter between two insecure individuals who find comfort with one another by the end.

Joychild - A documentary piece showing a child discovering and opening up about their gender identity.

Q&As

I attended a few Q&As, but my favourite I believe was CODA’s.

They spoke about how they worked around language barriers and learned sign language before and throughout production. Everyone just seemed at ease and like they had a great time in production of the film.

- - -

Overall, I’m quite pleased with how this festival went virtually. It was a truly amazing experience which I am so glad I was able to take part in. It was as Immersive an experience as I think could be created virtually and seemed to go relatively smoothly for the most part for having it be the first time this has happened.

I’m also extremely grateful for the inclusivity which allowed for those who may not be able to travel as easily due to disability, financial reasons, or anything else. I don’t know if I’d have been able to go otherwise.

This experience was more amazing than I even hoped it would be. I feel so inspired that I plan to find out how to submit to Sundance so that I can possibly try to get a short film idea I have done for the short film/18-25 year old category. I feel like I can actually do this now and I have so many new ideas.

Thank you!

Tryon, Chuck,

On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies

Mae McCloskey

#sundance sundance2021 sundancefilmfestival indie indiefilm

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theliterateape · 4 years

Text

History is a Puzzle Box of Rashomon

by Don Hall

I’ve often said that the scariest thing to ever come out of my mother’s mouth was the declaration “Let’s go on an adventure!”

For my mother an adventure must include a lack of preparation, potential for danger, and a sense of I can’t believe we just survived that! She once decided she wanted to do a charcoal sketching of a gravestone from the grave of one of our Appalachian Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher ancestors. My dad drove her up into the mountains and they started seeing patches of purple paint on trees and rocks.

Turned out that was the locals’ way of telling outsiders they'd get shot if they trespassed. My dad clutched his pistol the rest of the way.

Mom got her charcoal sketch. I can’t believe we just survived that!

When I was a kid and we lived in Arizona, mom decided we were going on adventure. My little sister, mom, and I loaded up in her brown Gremlin, a bag of sandwiches, some sodas, and all of our swimming gear and headed out for an afternoon at Lake Pleasant.

All was copacetic until she thought she saw a shortcut to he lake. It was not a shortcut. It was simply desert. It started out as a bit of a dirt path that sort of petered out about an hour into the drive. We were driving in the open desert in the vehicle equivalent to a Pinto.

Of course we blew a tire. Of course we didn't have a spare.

Being a melodramatic kid, I went into a full-blown faux-survivalist panic. After a few minutes of wailing about our imminent demise I set out to figure how to get water out of cactus, the thorny testaments to the heartiness of desert foliage fending off my un-callused hands and delivering exactly no water.

This being decades before smartphones, we were stuck. We had no clue where we were in terms of the comforts of civilization and while mom put on a brave face (and occasionally got the giggles at my histrionics) our fate was sealed. Unless someone miraculously drove into the middle of the desert to save us, we were doomed.

And then the miracle occurred. A beat-up red Ford pickup truck coming from the other direction popped up on the horizon. I shrieked in relief; mom flagged the truck down.

We were about a mile from a highway but we couldn't know that. The driver of the pickup was taking a shortcut from the highway.

Here's where the story gets odd. To this day, my mother's version of this adventure and mine are identical. Word for word the same until we get to the driver of the Ford. On my life, I swear it was an older Native American man who stopped, hitched up the Gremlin to his vehicle, and towed us the mile to the highway and on to a gas station.

My mother will go to her grave insisting it was a family of four Mormons.

What?!

We’ve had family arguments about this story. Both my mother and I are intractable in our insistence of our specific endings of either Native American man or family of Mormons. We both were there. We both can see ourselves in the tale. The endings are as different as could be.

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold. The more you tell the story, the more it transforms into something similar but wholly different in the margins.

If my mother and I can have such divergent differences within a memory of an event we both shared, how many splinters are there in a collective re-telling of a larger event encompassing many more tellers? How many completely incompatible versions of the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001 are there? How many versions that don’t quite line up with one another are there of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?

Moving forward and backward in history, if we are to accept (and I do) that our memories are more Silly Putty than Lego Bricks, how much does film, television, books, and social media come into play in the constant morphing of objective truth to the collection of subjective memories and finally commonly accepted reality?

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold.

Back in the olden days when one could watch something horribly incorrect in the political sense without it becoming a ringing endorsement of your personal "brand" or a scathing indictment on who you are as a fellow human, I went to a screening of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. It was at an esoteric video shop/screening theater on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago called Facets Multimedia and there were six or seven others in attendance. I was the only white person in the room.

Historically, Griffith's opus is significant in several ways.

First, it was among the earliest epic uses of film. Released in 1915, it was the first blockbuster Hollywood hit. It was the longest and most-profitable film then produced and the most artistically advanced film of its day. It secured both the future of feature-length films and the reception of film as a serious medium.

Second, it was the first modern popular culture example of an artistic achievement attempting to force a certain perspective on the larger culture (the idea that the KKK were the heroes of the Civil War) it was initially released with the title "The Clansmen" and reframed the war, Reconstruction, and white hooded sheets in tandem with lynchings as the preferred story of American history.

Third, while propaganda has been around since men could talk and write, it was the most pervasive use of a medium that communicated on a newfound mass level to promote a horrifying ideology and was embraced by President Woodrow Wilson as a personal favorite.

Following the three-hour screening, there was a sense of discomfort as the lights came back up. My guess at the time it was the other viewers in the room wondering if I, the sole white person in the room, was as offended by the revised perspective the film espoused as the rest in the small cadre. I suppose I wasn't as offended because I wasn't black and I knew what I was getting into when buying my ticket. I can imagine seeing the film without some context would be like a slap in the face.

One of the things I learned doing stage combat around the same time was that a slap in the face never hurt as much as you'd think. It wasn't the pain of the blow but the surprise of it that gave it impact. Going in cold to see the KKK presented as the true patriots wouldn't hurt but the surprise might be a shock.

In a very different way but in the same vein, I remember being the only white face in a crowded theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the opening night of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The looks of inquisition for my reaction to the film from the predominantly black faces followed me out into the lobby and into the parking lot.

I read recently that one of the reasons the scars of that Civil War in America have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative of why we fought the goddamned thing. The subjectivity of truth in the re-telling of that dark period is confounding and subsequent attempts to force one perspective or the other or multiple angles on the causes of the War of the States has only confused the issue. Thus the recent beheadings of statues glorifying Southern generals and the re-naming parties of public schools to eliminate anyone associated with slavery.

I understand and empathize with this impulse to reverse the whitewash of history from our streets and schools. So much of our literature and symbols in real life have been created with, maybe not a D. W. Griffith subjectivity, a revisionist historical perspective that paints over the ugliest parts of our history to re-tell the narrative and erase those most subjugated by it. I expect over-correction (like the New York Times 1619 Project which casts our history as steeped in nothing but racism and slavery without acknowledging the contributions set apart from those stains) and, after reading that San Francisco schools are eliminating Abraham Lincoln's name, I decided to re-watch Spielberg's Lincoln.

I don't know if it was actually Lincoln or screenwriter Tony Kushner who came up with the following analogy but I found it instructive in the push to reframe the story today.

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll... it'll point you True North from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way.

If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp... What's the use of knowing True North?

The film paints the fight for the 13th Amendment as a dark political game, cajoling and persuading the legislators of the day to codify in the Constitution a formal revocation and rebuke to the forced enslavement of other human beings. It also portrays Lincoln as a deeply pragmatic leader. The speech is one he gives to Thaddeus Stevens, a zealous abolitionist, who rightly sees true north but, up to that point, would rather be righteous than successful in abolishing slavery.

Both men are long dead so the question of whether both men would tell the same story, in their re-telling of those pivotal moments leading up to the vote, or if their stories would radically diverge, is wholly academic. That’s where the trappings of art collide with authenticity. This is the version Spielberg and Kushner decided upon and it will be the version millions who watch the film and decide to simply accept it as the one true version.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact.

On the other hand, we have celebrated author Mark Manson, whose book Everything is F•cked: A Book About Hope is being banned in Russia by Putin because it speaks directly to atrocities committed by Stalin. Putin is looking to re-write Stalin's history.

There is a big difference between revising a history shown to diminish the effects of overt racists in one country and purging a country’s history of established monstrosities but the mechanism remains the same: reframe the story and tell it enough times that the meaning changes over time. Keep pushing the new narrative (right or wrong) until the soft memory of an entire nation bends to the will of the teller.

That’s all history is, after all. A slew of stories we tell over and over to indoctrinate a sense of national pride. It grows more perilous when those revising the stories weren’t present. The source of the tales becomes less reliable and the reframe more suspect. When the source is a film or video of an event, we feel as though we’ve experienced it but our perspective is entirely subverted by what the camera shows us and the narrative promoted when we watch it.

One of the techniques that Griffith practically invented was the camera’s use to tell the story from his view. Frame things in a certain way, in a certain order, and our very eyes are deceived, our minds accept the deception, and we believe.

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa gave the world the reigning example of individualized subjective point of view. Rashomon shows us three different perspectives on one specific event. The film makes the point so clearly that the term used popularly to label the he said/she said/they said dilemma is a rashomon.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact. Show me someone absolutely 100% certain of the sort of events they've only seen on an iPhone video moderated by Faceborg and spun by both the media and some random stranger and I'll show you someone deluded and quite probably dead wrong.

Even when we're there to witness events in person we get it wrong so the concept of getting it right through the mediation and manipulation of amateur videographers and activist pushing a narrative is nothing short of lunatic fringe.

Bizarrely, we all know this to be true.

We know that social media is almost entirely unreliable. We know that film is a highly manipulative art form. We know that Robert Downey, Jr. never flew in a suit of armor, that Keanu Reeves is not Neo, that as much as he embodies who I hope Abraham Lincoln was like, Daniel Day Lewis is an actor and couldn't possibly know what the man was actually like in person.

We know this to be true but we need to be right. We need to believe and so we take that leap of faith, that gut level adherence to what makes some sort of sense in the story and run with it. More so, if the fiction supports things we already have chosen to believe in, we are adding it to the arsenal of defenses against any other sort of view of our story.

We know there's more to the story of the Antifa takeover of Seattle. We know there's more to the January 6th breach of the Capitol. We know there are more sides to the story of Michael Brown. We know that with everyone filmed in a Walmart screaming about her right to forego a mask there is something else before and after that moment that may demonize her just a bit less.

We know but we don't care. Context and considering the framing takes too much work. Too much time. In an existence flooded with too much information, too many stories, too much video, too many opinions, it's just fucking easier to settle on the story that suits you and roll with that.

That's why—no matter what my mother says—it was definitely not a family of Mormons and I'll go to my grave with that.

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nightmarenomore-blog · 7 years

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Nurse of Nowhere

Nothing I learned in school could have prepared me for this.

I finished Loyola Nursing, a good program in Chicago a few months back and landed a stellar, OBCN gig at an old folk’s home…

In Oklahoma

I wasn’t the best student or the best practitioner,

I barely passed my classes,

I managed to slip under the cracks for the degree.

No hospitals in Illinois would touch me as all the other nurses were way more qualified and could keep a decent conversation; I was a computer nerd and a loner so my social skills didn’t transfer over to the patients and clinicians too well. My mom had a friend who worked in Oklahoma City and told her they were in need of nurses for the growing geriatric population (apparently the heart of the dust bowl was very attractive to the baby boomers). She put it a good word to a residence a few miles out from the city and they hired me after the phone interview; they clearly were in desperate need of help, which benefited me greatly.

I rented a studio on the outskirts of town for 500 a month and moved in late July. My mom and I made the 16 hour trek with my mattress and heaping bags of clothes, video games, and toiletries. I had always been a bit of a hypochondriac and clean freak, making me a perfect fit to be in the medical field. My room was always spit shine clean and I’d tell me friends they could eat dinner off my toilet because it was so clean (well my online friends because I didn’t get along with any of the nurses). I get situated over the weekend and start working that Monday, too soon in my opinion but my mom wouldn’t leave until I finished my first day.

There were three nurses in the home that tended to 50 seniors, mostly male. Each had their own living quarters and there were two residential areas with sofas, tables, and most importantly a 50 inch flat screen TV. The seniors spent most of their time in the rec area watching reruns of I Love Lucy and old western films. My main job was to check their vitals, deliver their meals three times a day, and change their diapers and catheters (almost every single one of them couldn’t control their bowels or their bladder). I figured that I would act like a glorified caretaker from what we learned in nursing school, but having it be part of my daily routine was demoralizing and demeaning. I learned to suck it up and just deal with it as I really didn’t have much else of a choice.

For three weeks, I was the glorified adult changing old people diapers and handling flaccid dicks by recreating humane and non-traumatizing versions of kids in the sandbox. Their meals consisted of oatmeal for breakfast, corn and mashed potatoes for lunch, and chicken pot pie for dinner; every. Single. Day. How they didn’t go crazy was beyond me, maybe it was that the daily routine felt normal to them and something they could count on. Maybe it was the fact that most of them had dementia and didn’t realize they were living the same day over and over again. Nonetheless no one complained about the food and as long as I changed their diapers, they were satisfied and content.

I noticed something odd after my three weeks. Each Saturday night, each senior citizen would gather in the west rec room to watch Saturday night live. Not the old 80’s versions, but the new episodes that were broadcast live. They all sat there in silence for the whole hour, glaring at the screen with a smile on each face. It was as if they were glued to a hypnotist that placed them in a trance. They were even more zombie like in this hour than throughout the day; I couldn’t get their attention if I came up to their face and poked their eyeballs.

The following Friday I received a rather strange weather report. The Mississippi river had flooded and carried along with it a huge swarm of mosquitos. The old folk’s home was only a mile west of the river which gave it easy access to fresh water and daily goods for the seniors. Everyone was told to stay inside for the weekend but being from Chicago I lived and dealt with mosquitos my whole life; how bad could it be I thought. I went into work that Saturday afternoon and went about my business, delivering food and cleaning butts and dicks. 9:30 rolls around and I see the seniors beginning to congregate to the west rec room, SNL was about to be on. I walked over to the east part of the complex to gather my thoughts and saw a dark shadow in the distance. Puzzled I stood trying to uncover what it could be. An abnormally large cargo plane? An overfilled cloud that hasn’t had the chance to release its rain? Or even a horde of galloping bison crossing the prairie late at night.

I stood for 10 minutes guessing until I was faced with the startling and horrifying reality; it was the mosquitos from the weather forecast. Terrified I ran to the west rec room to warn the patients and nurses but they were either too tuned into the TV or wouldn’t believe me. I star panicking and run to each room to close all the windows and any opening leading outside. I confront one old man sitting in his room staring east at this oncoming black swarm of death, un-phased and accepting of his fate.

“Sir! I need you to leave your room. We need to get everyone to safety. NOW.”

I sternly addressed him so he knew I meant business.

“God works in mysterious ways my boy. Perhaps this is finally justice for all the wrongs I’ve committed and gotten acquitted for. My time on this Earth is nearing its end; this will be a fitting way to go.”

He spoke with a soft and somber tone, welcoming death with open arms. There was nothing I could say to change his mind.

I left the man in his room and made my way to the west rec room, SNL had just started so I needed to do something drastic to get the seniors attention. I ran up to the TV, pulled the power plug, and stood in front of the black screen.

“Listen to me everyone! There is a giant swarm of mosquitos coming our way. I need you all to come with me to the kitchen. There are no windows or points of entry so we will be safe until help can arrive.”

All of them looked dumbfounded and frozen; eyes open wide like deer in headlights. I realized what I said hadn’t registered in their heads, they were still wondering why the TV had been turned off.

“You’re the boy that brings me food and changes my wiener straw. Turn the TV back on!”

Yelled one senior from the back of the room.

“What are mosquitos? I fought in two wars. I can handle some pesky bugs. I want the funny man back on!”

Pleaded another from up in front.

My words went through one ear and out the other. Preaching to these old folks wouldn’t convince them at all, action had to be taken. I started walking to each of the seniors, pulling down their pants, and removing their catheters. One by one I was collecting plastic dick tubes and unleashing streams of piss onto the ground of the west rec room. Angrily, the mob of old men started chasing me down the hall and into the kitchen, my plan was working.

Unfortunately, I was too late; the mosquitos had already flown in through the air vents. In between the west rec room and the kitchen stood myself, and angry mob of old geysers soaked in piss with their pants around their ankles, and bloodthirsty mosquitos the size of acorns. I had never seen mosquitos this big anywhere in Illinois, even when full of blood they were the size of a pine nut and could be swatted to death instantaneously. These mosquitos resembled bats in a peculiar way; insect wings comparable to that of a hummingbird, and stingers that could be substituted for a midget catheter and a blood sac on a few that had eaten the man in the east wing that expanded to three times the size of their body. It’s as if they were genetically created by a lab of vampire scientists needing a better way to acquire blood.

I quickly dropped the handful of wet catheters and jolted to the emergency exit just north of me. I felt no remorse for the dozens of geriatric patients I was abandoning; they were close to death and had lived fulfilling lives, nothing about their time in this home was satisfying or worthwhile compared to their early life adventures. I was no longer a nurse helping the old and sick, but scared young adult fighting for his life. I figured that the mosquitos would feast on the old folks and I would have a good chance of escaping. As I ran out the door and into the parking lot, I saw my car a mere 30 feet away. I sprinted as fast as I could while digging into my pockets for my keys, I didn’t dare look over my shoulder to see what was unfolding. 10 feet from my car my remote start and turned on and the door unlocked, I opened and closed the door in a split second and felt at ease for the first moment in a long while. I didn’t even have the time to take a breath before I heard a thud on my car. I had just merely out run a hungry mosquito that followed me out the door. He didn’t time his ascent correctly and smashed into my window and now lay twitching on the parking lot concrete.

As I backed out of the driveway, I heard muffled screams and gasps from the old men being drained of their life force, slipping away against their will into darkness. I turned on the radio full blast to drown out their deathly cries for help and drove away as fast as my civic would accelerate, trying to forget what has just transpired. Ultimately, I was in shock and my body wouldn’t stop shaking. I put my car in cruise control and just drove west for a good hour, twenty one pilots calming my nerves little by little to suppress this event deep into the nether regions of my mind.

#story #nightmare #nurse #horror #first person view #tale #epic #fable #short story #short story telling #swarm #sad #intense #cryptic #writer #writers on tumblr #my writing #writing

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mytherapistsays-blog · 5 years

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The Princess Switch is a Tale as Old as Time

The Princess Switch is a Tale as Old as Time ⁣⁣ ⁣⁣ @MyTherapistSays ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣ https://mytherapistsays.ca/the-princess-switch-is-a-tale-as-old-as-time/

Or… as old as the merging-of-two-frames editing technique. Vanessa Hudgens is the latest star to sink down to join in on the low budget Christmas movie train, playing two mysteriously identical strangers who swap places and assume each other’s identities. Sound familiar? The answer should be yes, because since time immemorial we’ve witnessed many a Disney starlet in more or less the same film. The question is, who did it better? Someone call Us Weekly, because we are blowing this sh*t wide open.

IT TAKES TWO

(MARY KATE & ASHLEY OLSEN, 1995)

Okay, to be fair (barring any outlandish conspiracy theories), these two actually are separate human beings, but the identity swap principle still applies. In this 90’s classic, orphan-girl/ inner-city-kid Amanda attempts to trespass explores the woods beyond the grounds of her summer camp and bumps (quite literally) into prim and proper Alyssa, who lives with her rich ass wealthy father, Roger. Amanda is about to be adopted by the Butkises, the family who collects kids for child labour- actually you know what, it was for child labour- and Alyssa is about to have the gold-digging stepmother from hell, Clarice. They decide to swap places so Alyssa can know what it’s like to be a real kid and Amanda can know what it’s like to have real human affection, and they work together to set up Alyssa’s social worker with Amanda’s father. Chaos, food fights, and less-than-romantic horseback rides ensue.

Pros: Olsen twins before their acting skills absolutely nosedived. Kirstie Alley. Whoever the rich dad’s driver was.

Cons: The Butkises. The horror that was THIS scene.

Most memorable line:

Amanda: It’s got to be that can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, World Series kind of stuff, right?

THE PARENT TRAP

(LINDSAY LOHAN, 1998)

Another unmistakable 90’s classic, which also coincidentally involves the same-but-not-the-same girls to meet over summer camp. Hallie is a cool, laid back Cali gal while Annie is a posh English girl. Despite a rocky start meeting at summer camp (what are the chances!) the girls realize they have the same birthday… and the same parents- wait, they’re sisters?! They decide to switch places so that they can like, actually MEET the other parent who has abandoned them for years, and set up their rich vineyard owning father with their classy but slightly disheveled mother, and also get rid of their treacherous stepmother to be, Meredith Blake. They succeed, and though this movie has the best cast and best soundtrack possible, it is seriously unsettling how f*cked up it is for their parents to keep them apart and live without one of their own daughters. What kind of co-parenting tactic is that?!

Pros: Dennis Quaid. Dennis Quaid. Dennis Quaid. The epic handshake sequence. Vineyards. London. The crackling-candy-wrapper-to-sound-like-static phone hack. Also Janice from Friends.

Ohhh. Myyyy. GAAAHD.

Cons: The cringey prank wars between Hallie and Annie that are honestly very telling of how frightening and ruthless 12 year old girls can be. The hot-pin-and-apple-as-a-homemade-ear-piercing-kit. Meredith and the lizard. This movie is not for the weak of stomach.

Most memorable line:

Hallie (or Annie, who tf knows): So if your Mom is my Mom and my Dad is your Dad… and we’re both born on October 11th, then you and I are… like… sisters.

THE LIZZIE MCGUIRE MOVIE

(HILARY DUFF, 2003)

In the best movie-from-a-TV-show production of all time, Lizzie and her, like what, eighth grade graduation class take a graduation trip to Italy (??? wtf? Is this PCA? How is everyone affording this?). Lizzie bumps into Paolo, a cute, charming Italian boy whose age I am really troubled by and don’t want to think about too much tbh, because I am already scarred from watching one too many episodes of Age Gap Couples. While Gordo is trapped in the Upside Down friend zone, Lizzie begins gallivanting around Rome with Paolo, who out of the blue drops a bomb on her that she is the exact Doppelganger for his former singing partner and could she like, assume her identity? Leave it to Lizzie McGuire to say yes, Kate willingly helping her out by covering for her (yes, hell really has freezed over) and shit to hit the fan. It all ends with Paolo being exposed for the weenie that he is (which we really should have anticipated from this lewk below):

We have Lizzie performing at the Colo freakin seum, while Gordo is clawing his way out of the friend zone (but I’m sure if Lizzie McGuire continued into their high school years she would have fallen for a Jesse McCartney or equivalent hottie of the day and dumped Gordo’s ass).

Pros: Italy. Pasta. Ethan Craft!

Cons: Paolo. No Miranda?!

Most Memorable Lines (because you can’t pick just one):

Kate: Lizzie McGuire, you are an outfit repeater!

Miss Ungermeyer: David Gordan. I think that’s Italian for ‘sneaky little brown noser with a hidden agenda’.

Miss Ungermeyer: Mr. Craft, you are in the most beautiful city in the world, is this having any effect on you?

Ethan: Yeah the cobble stones are like totally thrashing on my wheels.

Isabella: Sing to me, Paolo!

MONTE CARLO

(SELENA GOMEZ, 2011)

After years of saving from her shitty waitress job, Grace, a down-on-her-luck Texan girl fresh out of high school, finally gets to go to Paris with David Cassidy’s daughter her coworker Emma. Instead of the vacation of her dreams, she gets a shitty tour bus version of the city with Blair Waldorf as her salty stepsister, Meg, tagging along. It doesn’t take long for the girls to have a falling out and find themselves in a swanky hotel lobby to take shelter from the rainstorm that is kind of a metaphor for their disaster of a trip. Their luck changes when Grace is mistaken for a wealthy British heiress, and with some encouragement from Emma takes her place and fills in for her duties, which leads the three girls to Monaco. Grace falls for Theo, a local rich boy with other character qualities that don’t seem notable to me at the moment; Meg falls for an adventurous Aussie, and Emma just really wants to get home to her long term boyfriend Owen and install some dimmer lights. Of course the fiasco unfolds when Cordelia returns unexpectedly, and some drama goes down with an expensive piece of jewelry going missing (a telltale sign of an unoriginal plot). But not to worry because just like every chick flick out there, everyone gets a happy ending.

Pros: The excellent casting of romantic interests (Read: Corey Monteith, Luke Bracey, Pierre Boulanger). Who Says. Monte Carlo- it actually looks really effing bomb. Why is Monaco so underrated?! I might just be too poor to even have it on my radar as a travel destination.

Seriously. God bless this casting director.

Cons: Selena Gomez’s acting. Selena Gomez’s fake British accent. The fact that I will never be mistaken for an heiress and have a whirlwind romance with a foreign wealthy man.

Most memorable lines:

Grace: I finally meet a guy who likes me for me. And I’m not even me.

THE PRINCESS SWITCH

(VANESSA HUDGENS, 2018)

So here we are in present day. Let me just start by saying, there isn’t even a princess in this movie. Lady Margaret is a duchess. It’s called royal decorum honey, look it up. Stacy, a baker from Chicago, is somehow invited to this very prestigious international baking competition in Genovia Aldovia Belgravia (is anyone else noticing that these fake European countries all kind of sound like font families?), and ditches her bakery during what I assume would be her busiest time of the year to hop across the world with her business partner/ best friend and his daughter. There she runs into Lady Margaret, who mysteriously looks exactly like her and proposes they swap places so she can get away from the world of schedules. Stacy agrees, and falls for Margaret’s fiance of an arranged marriage/ loveless engagement, Prince Edward of Belgravia. Meanwhile Margaret falls for Stacy’s DILF friend Kevin. They manage to swap back before Stacy’s competition (which she wins despite her competitor cutting the cord to her Kitchen Aid, which she only notices after the majority of the cake has been baked, which like, b*tch, how were you mixing the batter before?), only for the Prince and Margaret to have to present the awards to the winners (because like, I’m sure that’s how William and Kate fill their schedule). Though Margaret had revealed their secret to Edward before the event, the four go backstage to give Kevin the downlow. Stacy is alarmingly okay with Edward (sort of) proposing to her, and Kevin is alarmingly okay with this despite having JUST caught feelings for who he thought was his best friend? Flash forward to a year later, and Edward and Stacy have married, and it is implied Kevin and Margaret are next? What the hell happened to their award winning bakery?

Pros: Gunner from Nashville. Kevin’s abs.

Cons: The haircut. The Jackie O blazer and pencil skirt ensembles. Another ill fated horse riding trip. The mysterious old guy who kept showing up but whose presence/ significance was never really explained?

Seriously, why is everyone dressed straight outta 1952?

Most memorable line:

Stacy/Margaret: In fact I took a nap on it. Slept like a log.

Edward: A log?

Stacy/ Margaret: Yes, dear, a royal log. It’s an expression we have in Montenaro.

Over the passage of time, the same-actress-two-characters/ swapping identities plotline has served us some of our most heartwarming and cheesy memories of film. I honestly don’t know if there really is a way to rank which is best, because they are all terrible in their own right. What matters most is that this tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme seems to keep going strong 20 years later, so we can expect another version of this more-or-less same story to make us gag/dazzle us in the coming years.

#funny #Hollywood #Movie #Princess Switch #Twins

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