#yes this is the most boring mundane bullshit Yes i want you all to reply wiht your opinion. go

[ferns]

poll: curtains or blinds? i like blinds because the slatted ones cast cool shadows & blackout blinds=best for creating a restful bedroom but curtains have a Flair to them

[beeexx]

Chapter 2 of To all the boys I’ve Loved before Tarlos au is up. You can read it here.

Here is a little tease :)

TK makes it as far as to his locker, his and Carlos’s contract safely tucked into a book of his in his backpack, when he runs into Paul.  

 Ah, well fuck, he’s oficially screwed now. 

Paul’s eyes are narrowed and he has that very obvious ‘don’t you dare bullshit me’ look he’s gotten famous for in their group which they all know very well that lying is the worst thing you can do in that moment. TK sighs and motions for Paul to follow him to the bathrooms so they can talk privately. TK checks each stall to see if they are empty before he turns to a very impatient looking Paul staring at him.

“Okay, so I can explain.”

“Can you? Good, let’s go.”

“So what do you want to know?”

“How you went from ‘I’m never going to date Carlos I never want to see him again’ to locking lips with him where the whole school could see.” Paul imitates his voice and it’s way too high pitched to sound anything at all like TK does, but he ignores it. 

“I don’t think the whole school could see...”

“Most people videoed it.”

“Right, yeah… of course…” TK hadn’t even thought about that, well fuck, that’s not exactly something he’d want finding its way to the headmaster or to any future collage or university applications. 

“Sooo….?”

“Well the day when you went off to see Lily.”

“For the chess club.” Paul corrects and TK rolls his eyes because that is not true, no matter how hard he tries to convince him of that.

“Anyway I almost reversed into Carlos, he was fine by the way. Then Matteo has been on my ass about me being lonely and ending up some kind of hermit or something and how I should get a boyfriend. He’s been really annoying and then some stupid letters I wrote ages ago got out, probably because they accidentally ended up in the Goodwill boxes I sent out only for Carlos’ to actually get his.” He rushes through the first part of the story so he can just get to the part where him and Carlos are fake dating, because that is now a thing.

“And he was all like I’m flattered but Alex bla bla bla Alex bla bla so I just kissed him on the pitch because Alex was there and I wanted to get back at him and Carlos was annoying and I lost my mind there for a moment I think. Cut to me running away to Cafe Corner to be cornered by Carlos again and for him to actually suggest we fake date to make Alex jealous, so now I have a fake boyfriend and it’s Carlos…?” Paul’s eyes have widened, like he can’t believe a word he’s just heard and TK doesn’t blame him because it sounds absolutely deranged to his own ears too. Then Paul starts to laugh, a little too loudly and a little longer than what TK warrants to be necessary.

“Man, this sounds like one of those cheesy romance novels you keep reading. This is like straight out of a movie, I love it!”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess.”

“This is so going to end badly.”

“What? Why? How?”

“Ah TK, my sweet innocent child.” TK huffs as Paul grabs him by the shoulders to pull him close, holding on very tightly which makes it impossible for TK to shrug him off.

“It’s going to end with feelings and heartbreak.” TK scoffs.

“Feelings? What are you talking about? Feelings for who? Carlos? Are you kidding, it’s all just pretend.”

“Well in a few months’ time I might say I told you so and gloat a little bit, but I will obviously be the shoulder you can cry on when I am ultimately right.”

“I’m just helping him get back at Alex, I don’t see that as a particularly bad thing.”

“Oh I have no problem with you getting back at Alex, he’s an ass, he deserves it, all I’m saying is that these things never work out the way you intend them to.”

“Whatever, also you can’t tell Mateo and Marjan, it’s bad enough that you know, we put no snitching in the contract.” Paul bursts out laughing even harder and TK feels his cheeks flush, but whatever, having a contract for these things are important, he stands by that. 

“I won’t say a word.” He says through his laughter and TK finally manages to pull Paul off himself and leaves while giving him the finger, to the sound of Paul’s laughter ringing in his ears as the door closes. 

The rest of the day stays blissfully boring.

……

“Mateo come on!” TK shouts for what feels like the 100th time this morning and throws his hands up in defeat when there’s no reply. “Okay fuck it, you can walk.”

“No swearing TK.” Owen chides and TK gives him the finger when he isn’t looking.

“I’m coming!” Mateo shouts but TK still can’t hear him make a move from upstairs so that’s clearly a lie since he’s been saying that for the last ten minutes.

“You go on your own, I can just drive him once he’s ready.” Owen suggests.

“Actually… well actually I’m not driving today.” He says carefully.

“No?”

“No, Carlos is supposed to take the both of us.”

“Carlos? Carlos Reyes?”

“Yes, we’re I guess friends now…”

“Oh, that’s amazing, I’m happy to hear that.” His dad says overly excited for something as mundane as TK making friends, but the look on his dad’s face sends a pang of guilt through TK, he doesn’t want to lie to anyone, but then he really doesn’t want to have a conversation about how he has a pretend boyfriend to get back at Carlos’ ex that happens to be Alex either, so keeping his mouth shut about it seems logical and it doesn’t feel like his dad has to know about it just this exact moment so.

“Mhm.” He will leave Mateo though, because it’s becoming too much for TK to stand in the kitchen and lie right now.

“I’m here.” Mateo says, fucking finally done, and looking exactly the same as he does on any other school day so TK has no clue what the hell he’s been doing all morning.

“Finally!”

“Bye kids, have a good day.”

“You too.” Mateo calls as he closes and locks the door, just as Carlos drives up the road. 

“Oh, hell yes.” Mateo says excitedly as he sees Carlos’ car. TK thinks it is ridiculous and can’t help but wonder if Carlos is trying to compensate for the car in lack of certain things in other departments but he stops himself thinking along those lines immediately because nope, nope, nope no.

“Morning.” Carlos says smiling and makes sure to open the door for TK who rolls his eyes while Mateo swoons in the back.

“Stop being weird.” TK tells him and Mateo swats his hand away.

“I’m just trying to get used to the idea that you’re actually dating Carlos. EEEHH I am so happy for you.”

“Yeah totally.” TK tries to sound excited as well. Carlos gets back in the driving seat and starts the car. 

“Hi.” He says gently to TK and TK smiles and nudges him further away, Carlos chuckles delightedly. 

“Oh, here by the way TK, it’s from Grace.” Mateo says and throws something in TK’s lap, TK’s face lighting up immediately.

“Ahhh yes.”

“What’s that?” Carlos asks.

“Oh this? It’s chocolate from the Scandinavian store, it’s the best chocolate in town.” Carlos looks doubtful.

“It is! Here try some.” TK breaks off a small piece and gives it to Carlos who instead of just taking it off from TK leans his face close to TK’s fingers and very gently but purposely puts his mouth just at the tip of TK’s thumb and index finger and takes the chocolate off him, the tip of his tongue brushing against TK’s skin, sending shivers straight up his spine and making him blush ridiculously hard, Mateo wolf whistling in the back of the car. TK’s eyes snap to Carlos who is looking at him instead of at the road ahead and what he sees there makes him feel hot all over.

“Yeah, okay, wow it’s good.” Carlos is clearly impressed, his eyes lighting up, making his whole face glow in happiness, and TK breaks out of whatever the hell just happened and gulps and stares straight ahead in order to get his bearings together.

“Yeah it is.” Mateo says and for a moment TK had even forgotten that he was in the car.

“Where do you get it from?”

“It’s all the way across from town, TK is too scared to drive there himself but Grace and Judd live much closer to it and Grace is literally an angel so every now and then she goes to stock up for him.” TK tries to glare at Mateo for spilling his secrets, and giving away the location of the best supermarket ever, you can get so many nice things in those shops that you would never be able to get from the normal ones and TK is particular about keeping quiet about its location. 

“Who is Grace and Judd?”

“Our dad works with Judd and Grace is his wife, she’s a 911 operator.”

“Aahh, okay.” Carlos says and looks like that cleared something up he must have been very confused about. 

They make it to school much quicker than it normally would take when TK drives and Mateo is ecstatic, his whole face glowing in triumph when they step out to the parking lot, gaining some stares in the process that TK could really do without. Mateo hides his snickers.

“Morning.” Iris calls, comes up to punch Carlos’ shoulder, high fives Mateo and levels TK with a stare he doesn’t think is exactly hostile but not totally friendly either.

“Hi. Iris.” He takes her hand.

“Hi, TK.”

“Right, right, yes of course. I know who you are.” TK’s eyebrow raises because to her he’s probably the guy who made Carlos spill out their Chinese food just before summer ended.

“You’re Mateo’s brother, he’s told me about you.”

Oh, okay, that wasn’t exactly what he was expecting but he guesses he’s fine with that.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”

“Sweet.” She leans against Carlos’ other side and puts an arm around Mateo’s shoulder, squeezing brotherly while Mateo looks like she’s hung the moon.

Oh no TK thinks.

“Iris, behave yourself.” Carlos scolds without heat.

“Me? I always behave. TK, if Carlos ever tells you that I was the one almost getting us arrested it’s a lie, remember that. It was totally him.”

“What? You almost got arrested?” Mateo pipes up by Iris’ side.

“Don’t go giving him any ideas Iris, I don’t want to bail him out.” TK says, a little sternly because he really doesn’t want to do that. Iris grins a little evilly, looking between the two, with Mateo giving her puppy eyes and TK trying to plead with her. 

“I think it’s a story for another time.” TK breathes out a sigh of relief and Carlos rolls his eyes at her. 

“Ignore her.” He whispers to TK and TK hopes he can. 

“Well, I have history, I kind of need to go…” TK says to Carlos, picking his phone up to double check the time, he hates being late.

“Yeah, sure, of course.”

“Come on Mateo, let’s go to chem.” Iris pulls Mateo with her and gives Carlos an unreadable look and sends him an encouraging smile as a parting gift, TK has no idea what their silent communication means, but they must know each other well if they can do it so easily.

“Okay, well I’ll see you at lunch, it’s a perfect opportunity for Alex to see.”

“Right, yeah, of course.” For a moment TK’s forgotten all about the whole making Alex jealous thing they got going but with Carlos’ reminder it’s suddenly very clear again that they are barely even friends. Come to think of it TK doesn’t even know that much about Carlos to begin with. He just nods and smiles and then picks up the pace to get to history and out of the vicinity of Carlos as fast as he can.

[moviesihaveseenbeforeiamdea-blog]

#1172 Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Source

Released: October 17, 2014

Director:  Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Written by: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Armando Bo

Starring: Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough

Had I Seen it Before? Yes

Why the Oscars are Irrelevant, part 329: For a reason beyond comprehension, the Academy decided that Antonio Sánchez’s iconic drum score for the film was disqualified from contention because it was “diluted” by other musical cues, which they believed lessened the impact. This same academy didn’t feel that the lack of self-awareness disqualified Crash from winning Best Picture. 

Birdman is a pretentious film, and that makes me love it all the more so. 

From the casting of Michael Keaton and Edward Norton as parodies of themselves to the film’s entire construction mirroring the pretension of Riggan Thomson’s staging of a Raymond Carver adaptation to revive his critical respect, there is nothing about this movie that isn’t self-aware. 

This is a movie where Michael Keaton stands on a ledge overlooking the streets of New York City, looking like he’s going to jump, only to have a woman shout out her question if it’s for real or for a film, to which Keaton’s Riggan Thomson replies “A film!” and the woman responds that “you people” are full of shit. This movie is Iñárritu‘s wink at the audience, accompanied by the man screaming at you “I'M WINKING!”

Some people did not appreciate this. Scott Tobias at The Dissolve had a notoriously savage review of not only the film but Iñárritu’s career as a whole (I liked 21 Grams, even if it is self-serious). The review is worth checking out, even if only for giggles. Everyone loves a good hatchet job. (For a more considerate take on the limitations of Birdman and its director’s career, look at James Robert Douglas’s examination for Junkee.)

Michael Keaton as Birdman and Riggan Thomson (Source)

But I don’t agree with Tobias’s analysis, if only because his review seems as self-serious and preposterous as the film and director it supposedly detests. It also feels defensive. As Douglas notes in his review, the conflicts in artistic vision and philosophy in Birdman may be unrefined and lame, but the resolution is so “absurd” that it doesn’t feel like Iñárritu honestly thinks of them as all that meaningful. 

I don’t think the Iñárritu s attempting to make a juvenile point about The Meaning of True Art, I think he’s presenting all sides of a boring argument with rudimentary viewpoints before casting it all aside as pointless, because fuck you, I’m Alejandro G. Iñárritu and I’m going to make my movies the way I want. 

What tips me off to this interpretation the most is the author whose work Riggan is attempting to adapt for the stage. For anyone who has ever attended a creative writing workshop or majored in English in college, Raymond Carver is an unavoidable, typically insufferable writer who exists---as Emma Stone’s Sam points out---for rich or well-educated white people who really have nothing invested in its point or outcome besides the bullshit cultural validation of knowing they are experiencing the “right kind” of bullshit cultural validation. 

Carver’s not a hack writer, but he is overrated and boring. Painfully boring. He is the archetypal “respectable artist” in fiction: obsessed with a self-serious style repeating the same maudlin, mundane themes of mortality, uncertainty, and trauma over and over to death without any awareness of the limitations of his work. In short, everything Iñárritu is accused of in his films.

I’m a sucker for long-takes. I know they’re a little saturated right now and everyone has their opinion on them, but they’re not a flash in the pan. There’s Rope, which I reviewed earlier, there’s the opening of Touch of Evil, a film I have seen and loved but haven’t gotten to yet here, there’s Children of Men, which has several classics in the style, and there are recent examples in television, like True Detective and Game of Thrones. In Birdman, they do what they’re supposed to do, ratcheting up the tension and prolonging the inevitable, dragging scenes out for all they’re worth before letting us off the hook with a minute to breathe. The claustrophobic setting in St. James Theatre also contributes to this, with the characters packed together tightly with little room to collect themselves and separate from each other. Everyone is losing their goddamned minds in this movie, and it’s hilarious.

Riggan and Edward Norton as Mike Shiner (Source)

I’m not sure if the part of Riggan was written specifically with Michael Keaton in mind, I think it has to have been, but I’m not going to bother looking it up because I don’t really care, the fact that it’s him in this role is perfect, and his bitterness towards ushering in the superhero movie industry with his performance as Birdman without reaping the astronomical benefits that the genre would later bring give Riggan a poisonous edge. In his mind, he sees himself as a respectable artist who tried to bring talent into his performance as a pop-cultural icon, something he sees as distinct from Robert Downey Jr. performing in endless Marvel movies as the tiresome and one-dimensional Tony Stark/Iron Man.

There are a few movies given as the example of when the modern superhero movie came to be. Blade is credited with giving Marvel any early success, and both X-Men and Spider-Man are seen as two important milestones, but it’s Burton and Keaton’s Batman has the most credible claim to it for me. And in the cultural conversations around these movies, Keaton doesn’t seem to have much respect afforded to him (and so little a legacy that his casting as Vulture in the newest Spider-Man movie isn’t seen as any sort of breach of the genre canon).

I doubt Keaton has that much resentment for the modern superhero movie, and his relatively unglamorous and restrained output for the better part of two decades seems like a personal choice rather than a career failure. He’s a particular actor who never seemed too much interested in superstardom, but maybe I’m only projecting my conceptions of the guy onto the man himself. Still, he channels what could reasonably be expected to be his real feelings of superhero movies into Riggan well.

Also notable is Edward Norton’s performance as Mike Shiner, a theatre purist and notorious bastard. I’ve heard all sorts of suggestions that Norton is a difficult actor to work with, which would explain why someone with his talent and intensity has been in so few prominent roles over the years. His own foray into superheroism with 2008’s The Incredible Hulk is another superhero touchstone that has gone on mostly unregarded (it was, in fact, the kick-off of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, predating Iron Man by months, but Iron Man is usually given the credit). I’ve never heard any definitive explanation for why Norton didn’t return as Bruce Banner, but I honestly can’t see him fitting into it all how it is now---he’s too niche in his appeal. But that this confluence goes unremarked on in Birdman tells me that maybe that’s a stone best left unturned.

Another facet of the movie that I enjoy to no end is Iñárritu’s preemptive rebuttal to the theatre critics bemoaning his commandeering of the St. James for two months to film the movie. The over-the-top antagonistic theatre critic in the film excoriates Riggan for being a celebrity playing dress-up with the theatre instead of with the superhero costumes where she feels he belongs, reeling with disgust at the idea that an acting nitwit like Riggan would have the balls to piss all over the hallowed ground. She tells him pointedly she’s going to ruin his reputation before even seeing the play. 

Riggan’s response is to literally shoot off his nose’s critic-problem to spite his face’s prestige-insecurity problem. And it works, he secures the celebration he wants from yet another audience (again, as Sam points out, one that is equally as vapid and useless as the popcorn-flick audiences). Given the problem of critical respectability feeding off its own unabashed hatred for a director, Iñárritu resolves it by implying that blockbuster or theatre, all audiences want is a little blood.

So there you have it, Birdman in a nutshell. I adore this movie. And yeah, I can admit its humor is petty and vindictive, but it is, in the end, and most importantly, funny. Iñárritu takes heed of his critics’ repeated condemnations of his work and its over-seriousness, whips out his dick, helicopters it while blowing raspberries into the air, and then asks if they’re satisfied now. He followed this movie up by directing The Revenant, another overwrought, super-serious (and some would say joyless) excursion into ridiculous intensity in form and function. I’m not nearly as much a fan of that movie as this one, but all the same, if the aim of Birdman was to give the finger to his critics before embarking on the movie he wanted to make most of all was the price I have to pay for living in a world that has Birdman, so be it.

Final thoughts:

Riggan talking about his body: “I look like a turkey with leukemia.”

The tailor on Mike undressing: “What’s happening? Where are your underpants?”

When Mike Shiner chastises society for looking at life through a phone I was taking a Snapchat of my cat on the entertainment stand swatting Edward Norton’s face

I enjoy the detail of Shiner not being able to get an erection with Lesley in their relationship but having no problem wanting to fuck her in front of a live audience. Birdman pulls no punches when it comes to mocking anyone involved with the production of Riggan’s play.