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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

#killing them softly #andrew dominik #andrew dominik film #brad pitt #Jackie Cogan #james gandolfini #richard jenkins #ray liotta #scoot mcnairy #ben mendelsohn #american cinematographer #financial crisis 2008 #independent film #beastie boys #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #musings

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zolganif · 3 years

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quarantinesurveys > suckitsurveys.

back to basics.

Do you take lessons for anything? No.

Has something really heavy ever fallen on you? No.

If you wear makeup, what colors do you usually wear? Eyeliner, eyeshadow, lipstick. Sometime blush.

Does your shower have curtains or a glass door/wall? A glass door.

If you have more than one pet, do they ever get jealous of each other?

Is there a room in your house that you don’t like going in? The basement. I don’t like going down there by myself at night.

Do you remember the last question you were asked? What did you answer? I guess this one. ha.

Besides salt and butter, do you put anything on your popcorn? Sometimes I eat popcorn that has a cheesy flavor to it.

Are you lonely? At times I am.

What’s your favorite magazine to read?

Do you like pineapple? No.

Have you ever seen fireflies? Yes.

Have you ever trespassed? Yep. When I was younger. In a abandoned house with Colin. Found a rainbow scarf inside and decided to keep it. I still have it too.

Do you tell your parents where you are going? Not always.

Do you raise your hand or participate in class?

Do you like visiting the mall? Why or why not? Sometimes.

Have you ever purposely hurt an animal? Fuck no.

Would you ever see a therapist? Yes. I need to see one again in the future.

Are you afraid of heights? No.

Are you afraid of the dark? I’m afraid of what I don’t know that could be in the dark.

Are you a jealous person? Nope.

When is your birthday? May 10th.

What are you listening to right now? Siobhan Fahey

Have you ever been caught doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing? No.

Are you still friends with someone from kindergarten? Yes, on Facebook.

What is the most important thing to you? My loved ones, Moxxie, small things that make me happy, taking care of health, making sure I have things I need.

Do you like whipped cream? Yes.

Are you close to your mother? Very.

Are you close to your father? Yes.

Do you walk around bare foot when you’re at home? Or do you wear socks? Either one.

Do you like chocolate popsicles? I prefer fruit ones.

Would you ever be your school’s mascot who wears that costume? No.

Would you rather see the Great Wall of China or Big Ben? Great Wall of China.

Have you ever written a poem? Yes.

Would you ever be a tornado chaser? Not interested.

What is your favorite thing to eat with bbq sauce, if you even like that stuff? Chicken.

Your parents tell you that this summer, you get to pick the vacation. Where do you plan to go? Let’s go to Norway.

What do you think is a good theme for a prom? Something that has to do with the stars or ocean. Or even a garden theme.

Have you ever had to do a class in summer school? No.

Do you get nervous when you go to the doctor? About what? Sometimes.

Have you ever been to the rainforest? No.

Have you ever created a website? No.

Ever thought about writing a book? Yes.

Have you ever had a dream where you killed someone? *shrugs*

Do you ever make up stories in your head and wish they come true? Hell yeah.

Which is worse: stuffy nose or runny nose? A runny nose.

Which is worse: Sick to your stomach or sore throat? Ugh. Both are terrible.

Do you think your last relationship was a disaster? It wasn’t exactly a disaster, we just weren’t meant for each other, didn’t have a lot in common and I didn’t feel a connection with him.

Have you ever solved a Rubik’s Cube? Nope.

Who do you think is the easiest to talk to? Mom, Andrew, Colin.

Would you consider yourself to be emo? Nope. Tbh, people who dress that way, I’ve never thought of them as ‘emo’. The term I would think is more correct is Scene. Pretty much the same thing and there’s really no difference between them. But eh, most people will never get that.

Do you have a favourite metal band or do you not like metal? I have tons of favorite metal bands.

What is your current desktop picture? A Ambreigns drawing <3

Thick or thin blanket? Depends on the weather or how the temperature in the room is.

Who are your favorite bands? *cracks knuckles*

Lordi, Straylight Run, Avantasia, Simple Plan, Darkthrone, 45 Grave, Evanescence, Endless Rain, Mindless Self Indulgence, Cinderella, Delain, Nightwish, Six Hour Sundown, Sum 41, Meg & Dia, VersaEmerge, Superchick, Sonic Syndicate, Marilyn Manson, Sirenia, Motley Crue, Within Temptation, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, Dramarama, Lennon Murphy, Heart, Vixen, Lita Ford, Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, and so much more.

And that’s just including bands. Well, besides pop ones and I also included solo metal/rock singers in there.

How do you mark through your word search puzzles? I don’t really do those.

Have you ever sewn something? Yes. Wasn’t great at it though.

What did you eat for dinner last night? Some chicken burgers.

Ever been grounded? Yeah.

Have you seen all of the Jaws movies? I think only the first one and second.

When was the last time you played cards? (not on the computer) It’s been a long time.

Have you ever drank Cherry Coke? Yep.

Have you ever had a black eye? No.

Have you ever eaten a bug? No.

Do you like pranking people? No.

Did you ever take a cooking class in school? Had to a lot of that in Boces in 11th grade. Being there got in the way of other classes I had. Ugh. And honestly, the teacher was a bit of a bitch. Like I guess because I dressed in alternative clothing, like tripp pants and listened to metal music, she saw me as an ‘evil’ or violent person.

Do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? No.

Do you use Skype? No.

Have you ever participated in local magazine cover girl searches? No.

Have you ever been called a skank/slut because of the way you dress? Yes.

Is your ex sexually attractive to you still? No.

Describe the most romantic moment you’ve ever had. Lots of times with Andrew.

Have you ever cheated on a test? No.

Have you ever been to couple’s counseling? No.

How often does your employer ask you to work overtime? They don’t.

Did you often read for fun when you were a kid? Yes.

When was the last time you were scared? I don’t remember.

What’s your favorite song by Rihanna? Unfaithful. Can you speak binary? No.

Would you rather live somewhere that had hurricanes or tornadoes? Neither, thanks.

Have you ever had a pet that you disliked? No.

When was the last time you saw hail? I don’t remember.

What is on your mind right this second: Not much.

Have you ever given a nickname to your pet(s)? Just some funny versions of their names. Like Fuzzball, I used to call her Fuzz or Fuzzy-Wuzzy ha. Moxxie, I call him Moxxie-Woxxy, and Sweetums ha.

When was the last time you shaved your legs? A couple of weeks ago.

Do you ever try free samples at the store? Yes.

Do you like boys with long hair? Yes. <3

Do you like root beer? No, but I like root beer floats.

What is the best fast food place, in your opinion? Wendy’s.

Do you have faith in yourself? Yes.

#survey

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buzzdixonwriter · 3 years

Text

Love / Like / Lust

“Love” is one of the many problems facing the English language.

Not the various concepts it represents, but the word itself.

Old joke: “I love a parade but I wouldn’t want to go to bed with one.”*

(* PornHub excluded.)

We use “love” to describe various feelings (“I love coffee in the morning.”) and emotions (“I love my kitty.”) and opinions (“I love that idea.”).

But as author Andrew Vachss points out: Love is a verb.

Love should be confined to what we do or show. It should be an action with concrete results, not merely a flurry of fuzzy feelings.

(None of this is brand new nor startling original; better minds than mine have commented on this for centuries.)

My opinion carries about as much weight as spitting against the wind in a hurricane, but I’d argue we should start by dividing love / like / lust and using them as follows:

===== LOVE =====

“A selfless action that helps another.”

This covers acts large and small.

Raising a child from birth to young adulthood should be an act of love.

Feeding a person who is hungry should be an act of love.

Donating clothes to a charity should be an act of love.

Caveat: One must constantly question and analyze one’s actions to make sure they’re not really selfish motives in disguise.

Too often, alas, they are actually thinly disguised transactional deals:

“I’ll take care of you as a child so you’ll look after me as an elderly person.”

“I’ll buy you dinner if you do me a favor.”

“I want a big tax write off for my donation.”

An act of love should be done with no expectation of recognition, reciprocation, or reward.

You help someone because not only it is ethically and morally the right thing to do, but because it creates and reinforces a societal pattern: Treat others the way you want to be treated.

This includes the Biblical injunction to “love thine enemies.” If, for example, there’s a person in your life whom you despise, who causes great trouble and distress for you, if that person is unjustly accused of wrongdoing and you have proof they’re falsely accused, it is an act of love to provide that proof and spare them from injustice even if you want nothing further to do with them.

Selfless love benefits all people, even if individual acts of love never directly benefit the person doing them.

“Love” is the only word on this short list that carries any ethical or moral weight.

===== LIKE =====

“A feeling of enjoyment or approval.”

Much of what we call “love” is actually just an intense emotional enjoyment of another person or thing.

There’s nothing wrong or derogatory with that.

I know of many loveless marriages where the partners act out of their own self-interest but enjoy each other’s company.

I know of many loving marriages where injury or illness robs one partner of the ability to participate or reciprocate fully in the relationship, but the caregiving partner selflessly continues to provide that care even though there is no longer any personal joy in it.

“Like” runs a gamut of intensity and hues. The “like” I feel for a good hamburger is different from the “like” I feel for classical music, and the “like” I feel for classical music is different from the “like” I feel for Hank Williams.

The emotion or feeling of liking someone or something carries no ethical or moral weight.

You can absolutely like Goldfinger as a fictional character so long as you don’t try to emulate him by blowing up Ft. Knox with a nuclear bomb.

You can like with varying degrees of intensity any number of people you encounter from spouses of friends and family to charming scoundrels so long as you do not act on that feeling in a way that would threaten harm to others.

Don’t put the move on your best friend’s partner.

Don’t look the other way when that charmer tries to cheat someone.

Like anyone or anything you wish, but be wise in how you express it.

Not everything needs to be shared.

===== LUST =====

“A desire for pleasure or satisfaction.”

If “like” is passive, “lust” is active.

You want something.

You may lust for gold or power or sexual satisfaction, but it’s always an inwardly directed desire.

Mind you, among fully informed consenting partners lust can be the basis of a successful long term relationship.

If one partner wants sexual satisfaction and is willing to show kindness and compassion and support in return, and the other wants to feel emotionally and physically safe and is willing to grant sexual favors in return, they may find a mutually agreeable long term relationship to their advantage.

Both of them lust for something, be it sexual gratification or emotional security.

The English language primarily confines “lust” to earthy appetites i.e., “a lust of life”.

That carries an implication of hedonism.

Again, the feeling of lust or the desire for hedonism in and of itself carries no ethical or moral weight.

But because it actively leans towards the gratification of the self, it’s dangerous.

Too often we can rationalize our worst behaviors by calling our lusts “love”.

Lust is 180-degrees the opposite of love.

It seeks to serve the self, not others.

Love -- acting selflessly to help others – can serve as an effective brake on the desires – fiscal or physical – of lust.

It provides the foundation of empathy that civilized societies need.

Properly controlled and guided, lust can be enormously satisfying and harmless to others.

But it’s always self-centered, pointing inward, not outward.

It’s better to live in a culture based on love than on lust.

In summary:

We need to be more precise in our language, because language shapes our thoughts and our thoughts guide our actions.

Speak rarely of love but show it often.

Be careful how we show what we like.

Temper lust with love.

#ethics #morals #love #like #lust #things of the spirit

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star-going-supernova · 4 years

Note

Hello Star. :) Do you think we could see the current Fic Update list? - Elsie

Absolutely, friend!

Fic Update (August 15):

Ready for Posting: these works are completed and will be posted on my Wednesday rotation.

• Countdown from Eleven, chapters 2-5(?)

• Paternal Protective Instincts (request from Elsie) - this one grew a plot without my permission; about 5,700 words

• Those Who Listen (And Those Who Hear), chapter 1 (request from MarvelKid22) - sequel to Law of Titans; about 2,800 words

• Casualties - destruction and a Titan fight; about 1,800 words

~~~

WIPs: a small selection of fics currently being written. I mostly focus on updates here, so if something that was on my last WIP list isn’t here now but it’s also not in the Ready list, it probably means I haven’t made enough progress on it for there to be a significant change to let you know about. If you have a question about one not on this list, though, please feel free to ask about it!

• another chapter for Big Brother - Andrew becomes Maddie’s guardian angel after he dies. the catch? she can see him; about 2,500 words

• amnesiac Ghidorah - i started this one against my better judgement, whoop; about 1,300 words

• the Atlantis: The Lost Empire crossover - it just keeps growing, help; about 5,000 words

~~~

On Deck: ideas that are currently on deck, meaning they’re the ones i intend to start working on once i open a few slots, so to speak.

• introducing Ghidorah to the human!Titans verse

• 2014 movie AU

• other Pacific Rim AU/more of Heavy as a Hurricane

• innocent!Emma AU? maybe? i kinda really want to write that scene i mentioned with Mark finding out.

• the next installment in the If You Give a Titan a Brownie AU, ft. Mark visiting Maddie

Another anon asked if I could give a brief synopsis of an upcoming chapter update, so minor spoilers for Countdown from Eleven beneath the cut!

In chapter two, Maddie faces Ghodorah down again, and this time, she’s not alone. But first, Dr. Serizawa has a nuke to deliver (which, funny enough, he also isn’t alone for) to a dying Godzilla. ;)

#i answered a thing #Elsie #star's story updates #life and times of star

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7r0773r · 4 years

Text

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Lolo always told us we could be whatever we wanted to be. When we were growing up, we never thought of white people as superior to us. We always thought we were equal to them or better.

But Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory had only to walk to the curb outside their Roman Street house to see Taylor Park and its sign: NO NIGGERS, NO CHINESE AND NO DOGS. It was a strange sight, the mostly empty, fenced-in park in a black neighborhood. If the neighborhood children wanted a park to run around in or a pool for swimming, they had to travel to Freret Street’s Shakespeare Park, several miles away. “It seemed most of the black people in New Orleans had to go over there,” Uncle Joe said. Getting to Shakespeare Park required a ride on segregated buses.

But there was an added complication in New Orleans, a city fixated on and obsessed with gradations of skin color. My mother, Ivory Mae, understood from a young age the value in her light skin and freckles and in the texture of her wavy hair, which she called good. The favoritism came through in the double-standard ways of all prejudice, in the way people lit up when they saw Ivory but did not come alive so much for Elaine, who wondered why she was a few shades darker than Joseph and Ivory and with thicker hair that she herself described as “a pain to comb.”

As a child, my mother internalized this colorism, the effects of which sometimes showed in shocking ways.

One day Ivory, Elaine, and Grandmother’s sister Lillie Mae were sitting together on the Roman Street stoop watching people. Mom was eight years old. A schoolmate, whom Mom called Black Andrew, walked by. He was headed to Johnny’s Grocery store. This was not unusual. Andrew passed two, three, sometimes four times a day, whenever he raised a nickel or a couple of pennies for candy. When he went by he stared, sometimes winking at Ivory Mae, who glared back from the porch. She was always taunting: Black Andrew, hey lil black boy. The neighborhood children on their respective porches urged her on without needing to. That lil black boy ain’t none of my boyfriend she remembers telling them.

He never did look like he was clean. I mean he was really a little black boy, nappy and everything. She meant that he was dark skinned, the color of her own mother, the color of her mother’s sister Lillie Mae, who was sitting right beside her.

“You have cheeks to call that boy black?” said Lillie Mae. “Look at your ma. What color is she?”

My mama not black, small Ivory Mae had said then.

She wasn’t black to me. She was my mama and my mama wasn’t black. Looked to me like they was trying to make my mama like the black people I didn’t like.

“I guess we saw it sort of like the white men saw it,” says Uncle Joe now, trying to explain his baby sister. “As people being lower than us.” (pp. 28-29)

***

Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in. (p. 223)

***

My mother, Ivory Mae, called me one day in Harlem and told me the story in three lines:

Carl said those people then came and tore our house down.

That land clean as a whistle now.

Look like nothing was ever there.

The letter from the city announcing the intended demolition, the planned removal of 4121 Wilson, had been sent to the mailbox in front of the exact same house set to be torn down, its pieces deconstructed and carted away.

The Yellow House was deemed in “imminent danger of collapse,” one of 1,975 houses to appear on the Red Danger List, houses bearing bright-red stickers no larger than a small hand.

The notice in the mailbox in front of our doomed house read in part: Dear Ms. Bloom: The City of New Orleans intends to demolish and remove the home/property and/or remnants of the home/property located at 4121 Wilson ... THIS IS THE ONLY NOTIFICATION YOU WILL RECEIVE. Sincerely, Law Department-Demolition Task Force.

Not one of us twelve children who belonged to the house—not Eddie, Michael, or Darryl; nor Simon, Valeria, or Deborah; nor Karen, Carl, Troy, Byron, Lynette, or myself—was there to see it go.

Look like nothing was ever there.

Before our house was knocked down, Carl had overseen its ruins, driving by almost daily, except for the day when he suddenly fell sick in the driveway of Grandmother’s house where he was living. One minute he was revving his engine for the drive to NASA in New Orleans East, the next, his head lay down on the steering wheel. A neighbor saw this, a busy man’s head down, and became alarmed. Carl was rushed to the hospital for surgery. “Crooked intestines,” was how Carl interpreted the doctor's diagnosis of intestinal obstruction. “They had to chop a large section of me out. I was all twisted inside from all that bad water I was swimming in,” Carl was convinced.

He stayed in the hospital an additional thirty days postsurgery after incurring an infection from the hospitalization itself. This was how it came to be that he missed the letter in the mailbox and the house was demolished without our knowing it.

Everyone else was still displaced. The only one to see our house go was Rachelle—Herman and Alvin's sister, Ms. Octavia's granddaughter who we called Ray. She was the inheritor of the last remaining house standing on the street. Ray snapped Polaroid images of the Yellow House's demise, instant evidence that she misplaced and could not find when we came back around, months after the fact, asking, “Did you see it? Did you see the house go down, Ray? Did you see?”

Perhaps there is a trick of logic that fails me now, but to deliver such notification to the doomed structure itself seems too easy a metaphor for much of what New Orleans represents: blatant backwardness about the things that count. For what can an abandoned house receive, by way of notification? And when basic services like sanitation and clean water were still lacking, why was there still mail delivery? But we were not the only ones. Lawsuits were filed against the city on behalf of houses that unlike ours stood in perfect condition when they were knocked down. There were sanctuaries, actual churches that deacons prepared to move back into, only to discover them gone. A newspaper article headlined NEW ORLEANS' WRECKING BALL LEVELS HEALTHY HOMES asked the simplest and thus most profound questions, such as: “How do you not inquire before you knock a place down? How do you not knock on the door first?”

During a later trip to New Orleans, I retrieved the file from city hall that told the story of the demolition. I carried it around in my purse and wrote “Autopsy of the House” in large letters on the front page. The cover letter held the following disclaimer: “The subject property was not historical in nature.” The report tells this story: The house was displaced from its foundation. Structural displacement was moderate as opposed to severe, which would have required that the house float down the block and settle in another locale entirely. City inspectors deemed the house “unsafe to enter.” There was asbestos everywhere, in the living room walls, in the trowel-and-drag ceilings that Uncle Joe had painted, in the asphalt shingles, in the vinyl sheeting on the floor. City inspectors noted that the left wall framing was severely "racked."

I called on an engineer friend and described the house, told her I was trying to learn from reading the autopsy which of the structural problems were waterborne and which were just the dilapidated house. An engineer would not use the word “dilapidated” to describe the house in its post-Water state, she told me. Dilapidated is a judgment. From an engineering perspective, she explained, the house was stable after the hurricane. It just wasn't contained. All the cracks happened so that the house could resolve internally all its pressures and stresses.

Water entered New Orleans East before anyplace else. On August 29, 2005, around four in the morning, water rose in the Industrial Canal, seeped through structurally compromised gates, flowed into neighborhoods on both sides of the High Rise. But that was minor compared with what would come two hours later when a surge developed in the Intracoastal Waterway, creating a funnel, the pressure of which overtopped eastern levees, destroying them like molehills. Water rushed in from in the direction of Almonaster Avenue, over the train tracks, over the Old Road where I learned to drive, through the junkyard that used to be Oak Haven trailer park, and into the alleyway behind the Yellow House, which may have served as a speed bump. The water pushed out the walls that faced the yard between our house and Ms. Octavia’s. The standing water that remained inside caused the sheetrock to swell. Water will find a way into anything, even into a stone if you give it enough time. In our case, the water found a way out through the split in the girls’ room.

“Water has a perfect memory,” Toni Morrison has said, “and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

The foundation of the Yellow House was sill on piers, beams supported by freestanding brick piles. Not an uncommon way of building in Louisiana, this foundation did not stand a chance against serious winds and serious flooding. The autopsy report testifies that our sill plate was severely damaged, that the connection was “pried or rotated.” It could be said, too, my engineer friend told me, speaking more metaphorically than she was comfortable with, that the house was not tethered to its foundation, that what held the house to its foundation of sill on piers, wood on bricks, was the weight of us all in the house, the weight of the house itself, the weight of our things in the house. This is the only explanation I want to accept.

The only structure that was stable at the time of demolition was the incomplete add-on that my father had built.The house contained all of my frustrations and many of my aspirations, the hopes that it would one day shine again like it did in the world before me. The house’s disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father’s absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.

I had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not. When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house. (pp. 228-32)

#sarah m broom #book quotes

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drreporting · 4 years

Text

Nuptials Pt.3

Tuesday Night.

“Hurricane Amy,” Derek confirmed with a slight chuckle, “That’s what they used to call her at school. She hated the name.” He took a sip of his whiskey, adding, “That, and Little Amy. Call her that if you want her to tear your eyes out.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Owen laughed, knowing how much Amelia hated it when people, aside from Derek, called her Amy, far less Little Amy.

“Amy was very volatile in school,” Derek continued, embarrassing his younger sibling in her absence, “She would just say things without even thinking about it. It got her into a lot of trouble.”

“I don’t think that has changed much,” Alex piped in, taking a seat at the table Owen and Derek were sitting at.

“I remember a little after our dad passed away,” Derek recalled, “Mom got called in to our elementary school for a fight she got in.” Derek laughed as he thought about the memory, stuttering to finish the story. “Amy grabbed a little girl by her throat and almost choked her because she said something mean about dad.” Alex almost choked on his drink as he erupted in a fit of laughter.

“The point of this entire story,” Derek concluded, downing the rest of his drinks, “Is to be careful of what you say to my sister. She will grab you by your throat.”

“Noted,” Owen smiled, shaking his head as Andrew, Ben and Jackson approached the table, carrying a bus load of shots on a plate.

“Drinks are here,” Ben announced, grinning mischievously at Owen.

“Uh, those are shots,” Owen corrected the firefighter.

“Same thing.” Ben placed four differently coloured shots in front of Owen.

“I can’t drink all of this,” the trauma surgeon tried to say. The other five surgeons were having none of it.

“Come on, Hunt,” Andrew encouraged him, “You only have a couple more days of freedom before you officially become a soccer dad.”

“I think it’s soccer mom, De Luca,” Owen curtly corrected.

“No way, dude,” Alex chimed in, taking a shot from the plate and downing it instantly, “Shepherd wears the pants. You’re definitely the soccer dad; she has you whipped.”

Owen frowned at his statement. “That is not true.”

“Then prove it,” Jackson taunted him, gesturing to the four shots in front of him. Owen looked around at his fellow surgeons, each of them with a smug grin on their faces.

Desperately wanting to prove them wrong, Owen sighed and said, “Screw it.” He downed all four shots, being cheered on by his colleagues. He could already feel the buzz creeping as Derek began to speak again.

“So, how is family life?” Derek asked, “With the new baby and all.”

“For a new born, Rosie throws a lot of tantrums,” Owen disclosed thoughtfully, “She and Amelia almost never get along.”

“Maybe because they’re so similar,” Derek shrugged, “From what I remember, Amy was the loudest crier and persevered during the longest tantrum episodes.”

“I’m usually able to calm her down,” Owen added, “So I don’t know what it is about Amelia that makes her so…agitated.”

“They’re two north pole magnets,” Derek metaphorically stated, “You’re likely going to have to be breaking up fights between them for the rest of your life.”

“Gee, thanks,” Owen muttered, suddenly defeated at the thought.

“We should’ve hired strippers,” Alex announced.

“Strippers, really?” Jackson laughed, “For all of our wives to kill us? The only person who isn’t married here, is De Luca.”

“I bet you the girls hired male strippers,” Alex insisted, “There are always male strippers at bachelorette parties.

“Amelia would never,” Owen assured the bunch.

“Amelia wouldn’t,” Alex agreed, “But Addison, Meredith, Jo or Arizona? They definitely would.”

“Oh, and the southern chick too,” De Luca piped in, “I can’t remember her name, but she looked pretty impish.”

“Charlotte,” Owen answered for them, feeling incredibly insecure now.

Sensing his mood shift, Alex quickly added, “Hey, but you’re basically marrying a party girl, Hunt, so you scored.” Reaching over the table to pat his shoulder, the paediatric surgeon winked and added, “Maybe she’ll do a strip tease for you later.”

---

“You hired strippers?” Amelia exclaimed after just entering the bar, only to find that drinks were being served by men dressed in bow ties and dress pants. Only.

“I’m reminding you of what you’re going to be missing out on once you tie yourself down to a man,” Charlotte teased the neurosurgeon, guiding her over to one of the servers. “Charles, this is the soon-to-be.”

Charles looked Amelia up and down and smiled. “A pleasure to meet you.” He then took her hand and guided it to his chest before letting it trail down his torso.

As soon as the guy walked off, Amelia commented, “He has a really hard chest.”

“I know,” the blonde confirmed, winking at her. Amelia rolled her eyes just as she heard Maggie screaming.

“Oh my god,” Maggie gasped as she looked at the picture on Addison’s phone. Tears came to her eyes. “Amelia, you look amazing!”

“You took a picture?” Amelia exclaimed, rushing over to Addison’s side to see that she had, in fact, taken a picture of Amelia in her wedding dress, “I hate you.”

“You do look nice, though,” Meredith commented as she joined the trio, “Owen won’t be able to keep his eyes off you.” Addison continued to talk to Maggie about the dress, while Meredith pulled her aside for a personal conversation.

“You look nervous,” she said as they reach the bar table.

“Is it that obvious?” Amelia sighed, calling to the bar tender for a glass of sparkling water.

Meredith smirked. “I’m hoping it’s the copious amounts of alcohol around you, and not the wedding.”

Amelia sat on the bar stool and bit on her bottom lip. “I feel like we’re making a mistake, me and Owen.”

“You already made Rosie,” Meredith joked, referring to the baby as their big mistake. Amelia rolled her eyes and smiled, but her nervousness remained as she looked around at her friends having fun. “You’re not making a mistake,” Meredith assured her, taking her hand, “Love isn’t a mistake, and trust me when I say that Owen loves you.”

It was then that Amelia looked her in the eye. “It just feels like we’re rushing everything, all the time. Dating, moving in, the engagement, Rosie.”

“Everyone has a different timeline for things,” Meredith advised her, “And, if not, I can drive the getaway car on your wedding day.”

Amelia laughed as her phone vibrated in her pocket. “I’ll remember your offer. Excuse me.” She hastily darted out of the bar as she looked at the caller ID on her phone. She didn’t recognise the number. “This is Dr Shepherd.”

“Amelia,” a familiar voice said on the other line.

She paused, trying to register the voice. “Ryan?” She hadn’t heard from him since their official introduction to their son as his father, which had surprisingly gone well.

“Hi,” he greeted softly, unsure of what to say next, “How is R. Junior?”

“He’s…good,” she said, weary of why he was calling, “How are you?”

“I’m not calling you for money,” he quickly said, hearing the hesitation in her voice, “I’m still sober. Five months now.”

Amelia smiled to herself, a sense of warmth filling her being. “That’s great, Ryan. I’m happy for you.”

“Me too,” he agreed, “I’m also happy for you; I hear you’re getting married.”

“I am,” she confirmed, thinking of how happy she was that she was marrying Owen. Maybe it was just wedding jitters.

“I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little jealous,” he disclosed, making her laugh.

“Of me? No way,” she teased.

“Lame, right?” he commented. There was a brief silence after, before he finally said, “I am genuinely happy for you, Amelia.”

She sighed in relief and smiled. “Thank you, Ryan.”

“Although, I always imagined that we would get married again and have more kids,” he sheepishly confessed, “But I guess I ruined my chances a while ago.” She knew he was referring to the countless time he’d shown up in her life, lying about his sobriety and toying with her emotions.

“It’s in the past,” she assured him, “Really.” Then, after a brief thought, she said, “You should come to the wedding.”

“I don’t know,” he mused, unsure of the idea of him and Owen in the same room, especially at her wedding, “I don’t want to make things tense or awkward for you.”

“No, I want you there,” she convinced him. When she heard no response from him, she offered, “I’ll promise you a dance if you come.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Ryan mused, “I guess I can’t say no.” Amelia laughed, glad that he had called, although she was reluctant at first to speak to him.

“Maggie and Arizona are drunk,” was the first thing Amelia heard when she came back into the bar. The words had come from Stephanie’s mouth. Standing by the door, she looked over at her friends. Addison, Charlotte, Meredith, Maggie, Jo, Stephanie, Arizona, even April. They had all come out to celebrate her future with Owen, and she couldn’t help but be so glad that she’d made one more good decision in her life, the decision to move to Seattle.

#omeliafics #omelia #owen hunt #amelia shepherd #addison montgomery #Charlotte king #ryan kerrigan #ryan shepherd #rymelia #rosie shepherd-hunt #nuptials

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frangipani-wanderlust · 4 years

Text

Trump is using Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as his intro music. Confession: I hate this song. It’s so syrupy.

Melania in a very nice green dress. Not relevant, but there it is.

Trump does not have as nice a cadence when he speaks as Ja’ron Smith did.

President begins his remarks by speaking to residents of places impacted by Hurricane Laura.

Now moving into the “my family is wonderful” bit. Melania getting a standing ovation. Now a farewell again to Robert Trump. The Pences getting a shout-out and some love.

Official nomination acceptance, so I think moving into the meat of the speech now.

“The Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln...” Did he just make a sneaky dig at Project Lincoln? Which, like, of course he takes a swipe at them, but I can’t believe it was sneaky!

“America is not a land cloaked in darkness. America is the torch that enlightens the entire world.”

I could do without the Andrew Jackson praise. The Trail of Tears guy is not a guy we celebrate.

Trump laying the American history creds out too. References to many former presidents, Lewis and Clark, Winston Churchill, World War II.

“The invisible enemy” is apparently going to be the catch-phrase they’re going to use to refer to COVID-19 in rhetorical approaches. Multiple uses of that phrase throughout the RNC.

Trump bringing to bear a lot of history, which I think he’s about to turn to a point that undermining the USA history of progress or rewriting history (a la the 1619 Project) is not a thing to make a goal.

Yep, compare and contrast now coming along.

There’s a long, sustained siren-y tone going off in the background, and I am worried again about the safety here.

“How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when they spent so much time tearing down our country?”

Trump is making a lot more effort in acting “presidential” this time around, and a lot of speakers have made oblique references to his habit of off-the-cuff remarks. I think this is a signal that somebody in the PR department got through to him about tact.

“Joe Biden gave people hugs and even kisses.” Big laugh at that. That was smooth.

That siren is still out there.

“Endless foregin wars, wars, wars” now dinging previous politicians on aggressive hawkishness. We’re going to hear more about that going foreward.

And here we go into the “drain the swamp” bit, where Trump defines “America First” not as a nationalist point, but one that prioritizes American citizens over American politicians.

All this “standing ovation” then sit down, then “standing ovation” then sit down. then “standing ovation” then sit down... It’s making me dizzy. Save the standing ovation for the end.

And another swipe at the CCP. Well, they deserve it.

“This country loves our law enforcement. We really do.”

No appologies for the restructuring of Tennessee Valley Authority here. And based on the number of states TVA gives power to, I’m wondering if we’re gonna see nuclear power being pushed harder as a counter-balance to the New Green Deal going forward?

If Trump gets reelected, two new SCOTUS judges will probably end up being six new SCOTUS judges before he’s done.

“And I say, very modestly...” LOL, no you do’t. Taking potshots at himself now, but I think that’s the point.

Trump goes a little bit off script a bit here and there, mostly to riff on himself.

Someone was just running back behind the crowd a moment ago!

Trump is really holding onto the podium here.

Describing Joe Biden’s record as being full of “Biden Calamities” is hilarious. And Trump is systematically dinging Biden’s record point by point down the line.

The CCP is getting booed by the crowd as Trump talks about them. Seriously not love for them here tonight.

Three minutes to 10, and Trump is still rolling. I think he’s gonna go over the time a bit. But he has gone back to recognizing Pence, CV-19 workers, and epidemic relief efforts.

The haters on Twitter are genuinely loosing their minds about this speech, and CNN is randomly inserting arguments on chryons over the speech. The mainstream media is not your friend. They will never tell you the truth.

Trump just promised a vaccine this year? I am deeply uncomfortable about that.

...On the other hand, given how deeply TDS runs, this virtually guarantees that if/when that happens, every Democrat in the world will be so hard against it that it can’t be made mandatory.

Tax cut now officially promised. “I will not raise taxes, I will cut them. Very substantially.”

“How can Joe Biden claim to be an ally of the light when his own party can’t even keep the lights on?”

Trump just called the Biden/Harris platform a “manifesto.”

Trump now promising nationwide School Choice.

“All chidren, born and unborn, have a God-given right to life.”

“Biden is a Trojan Horse for socialism.”

Some of these asides, although they sound natural, are very well targetted. I wonder if some of them are actually part of the written speech and not ad libbed.

“No one will be safe in Biden’s America. My administration will always stand with the men and women of law enforcement.” After out-of-town rioters burned down half of Kenosha, that line is going to resonate hard.

And now Trump is explicitly coming out against the rioting, which again, it’s weird that the DNC pretended this wasn’t even happening. They could’ve put a move out this and gave the RNC a free space.

Which Trump just called them out on, and correctly pointed out that the reason is because the Democrat polling numbers were going down and have donated to bail-out funds in many cases. That is going to smart.

And now directly making a case against cancel culture. I think this is an appeal to the “Shy Trump Voter” who doesn’t speak up about who they voted for for fear of being cancelled.

I think the speech is wrapping up, and the Republican convention has made a big case that a populist politician is accountable to the electorate, not other politicians. I think that’s going to resonate, precisely because it is a very inclusive message.

Yep. Speech winding up with a recap of Trump’s policy and platform. Definitely moving into winding down territory now.

“Our country wasn’t built by cancel culture, speech codes, and soul-crushing conformity.” And he goes directly from that line to tying history of American progress to encouraging American future without the “wasn’t built by” bits. And now giving the speech version of “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Aside from being a very inclusive statement, is a subtle rejection of palling up to celebrities.

“Americans build their future, we don’t tear down our past.”

“Together we are unstoppable, together we are unbeatable, because together we are the proud citizens of the United States of America.”

And that’s the ballgame. Convention ending not on a shouting note, but soft spoken ending here.

And now fireworks over the Washington Monument with clips from Carmen Dragon’s “America The Beautiful” as music.

Oh, nevermind, patriotic medley.

“Last week was the convention of celebrities and war. This is the People’s Convention.” - @JackPosobiec on Twitter.

#rnc2020 #donald trump

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imdoingthismspaintadventure · 5 years

Text

Worm Interlude 1 - In which we talk about “descendants” and “progenitors”

Huh? Interlude 1? What is this, some sort of bonus between sagas? Hmmm.

“We don’t know how long he had been there. Suspended in the air above the Atlantic Ocean. On May twentieth, 1982, an ocean liner was crossing from Plymouth to Boston when a passenger spotted him. He was naked, his arms to his sides, his long hair blowing in the wind as he stood in the sky, nearly a hundred feet above the gently cresting waves. His skin and hair can only be described as a burnished gold. With neither body hair nor clothes to cover him, it is said, he seemed almost artificial.

Oooh is this like backstory?? On the world itself?? This is all the way back to 1982!! It sounds like a documentary of important events of the past! Is this what the interludes are going to be? Lore bombs?. I’m game for that : D

So floating in the middle of the ocean was a man with long hair, no clothes, and his skin with the apearance of gold. That makes for an incredible mental image. Holy shit powers are awesome

He’s giving me strong Dr Manhattan vibes, but this one has hair and is yellow instead of blue.

“After a discussion including passenger and crew, the liner detoured to get closer. It was a sunny day, and passengers crowded to the railings to get a better look. As if sharing their curiosity, the figure drew closer as well. His expression was unchanging, but witnesses at the scene reported that he appeared deeply sad.

People getting closer to something that could be dangerous to record it and/or touch it is such a staple of humanity. That would 100% happen in our world

He looks deeply sad....Maybe it’s because of the Manhattan vibes, but this screams deep, profound loneliness to me. Or detachment from the world. Where did this golden man even come from? He was suddently spotted one day all radiant and sorrowfull...

“‘I thought he was going to crack his facade and cry any moment’, said Grace Lands, ‘But when I reached out and touched his fingertips, I was the one who burst into tears.’

Damn, they make him sound majestic. Holy shit.

Also this is totally a documentary! I love the format of this.

“‘That boat trip was a final journey for me. I had cancer, and I wasn’t brave enough to face it. Can’t believe I’m admitting this in front of a camera, but I was going back to Boston, where I was born, to end things myself. After I met him, I changed my mind. Didn’t matter anyways. I went to a doctor, and he said there was no sign I ever had the disease.’

!!!!!

The golden man can cure cancer! Is his power omni-healing? A universal cure? He basically did a miracle there!

He has this amazing healing power and was just floating idly over the sea... He still gives me massive Manhattan vibes..

“‘My brother, Andrew Hawke, was the last passenger to make any sort of contact with him, I remember. He climbed up onto the railing, and, almost falling off, he clasped the hand of the golden man. The rest of us had to grab onto him to keep him from falling. Whatever happened left him with a quiet awe. When the man with the golden skin flew away, my brother stayed silent. The rest of the way to Boston, my brother didn’t say a word. When we docked, and the spell finally broke, my brother babbled his excitement to reporters like a child.’

Were superheroes less common at that time? I mean, golden man here still seems amazing even with that we have seen, but they are acting like it happened in our world!

“The golden man would reappear several more times in the coming months and years. At some point, he donned clothing. At first, a sheet worn over one shoulder and pinned at either side of the waist, then more conventional clothes. In 1999, he donned the white bodysuit he still wears today. For more than a decade, we have wondered, where did our golden man get these things? Who was he in contact with?

So he has a contact! Who gives him clothes and maybe equipment? And no one in the world knows? He seems as much a mystery to them as to us!

“Periodically at first, then with an increasing frequency, the golden man started to intervene in times of crisis. For events as small as a car accident, as great as natural disasters, he has arrived and used his abilities to save us. A flash of light to freeze water reinforcing a levee stressed by a hurricane. A terrorist act averted. A serial murderer caught. A volcano quelled. Miracles, it was said.

H-Holy shit.

This makes Lung seem like nothing. What is even his power??

Curing diseases, freezing water, calming volcanoes....He performs actual miracles! Is his power just... all the powers??? Or a power that does everything???

How high in the hierarchy is this guy??

“His pace increased, perhaps because he was still learning what he could do, perhaps because he was getting a greater sense of where he was needed. By the middle of the 1990s, he was traveling from crisis to crisis, flying faster than the speed of sound. In fifteen years, he has not rested.

Oh my god....

He has been saving people and doing good deeds for over fifteen years, EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF EVERY DAY.

Holy fucking shit.

Is this the #1 hero?? The “All Might” of this world?? But this....this is even more insane. He’s like the ultimate good!

“He has been known to speak just once in thirty years. After extinguishing widespread fire in Alexandrovsk, he paused to survey the scene and be sure no blazes remained. A reporter spoke to him, and asked, ‘Kto vy?’ – what are you?

“Shocking the world, caught on camera in a scene replayed innumerable times, he answered in a voice that sounded as though it might never have uttered a sound before. Barely audible, he told her, ‘Scion’.

!!!!!!

This is giving me all of the chills, ever.

Scion

Descendant?? What does that even mean?? Why are you so mysterious and amazing at the same time, golden man????

“It became the name we used for him. Ironic, because we took a word that meant descendant, and used it to name the first of many superpowered individuals – parahumans – to appear across Earth.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WAIT HOLD THE FUCK UP

He’s just not the best, he’s the first!!!!

The first superhero ever!!!!

Oh my god, he’s superman! Both in meta and in-story!!

Godly do-everything powers, ultimate good, first ever superhero....

He’s the man of tomorrow!!! But without like the secret identity part. This is who Superman would be if he never stopped saving people, ever. If he was a hero all the time!!

THIS IS SO COOL.

“Just five years after Scion’s first appearance, the superheroes emerged from the cover of rumor and secrecy to show themselves to the public. Though the villains followed soon after, it was the heroes who shattered any illusions of the parahumans being divine figures. In 1989, attempting to quell a riot over a basketball game in Michigan, the superhero known to the public as Vikare stepped in, only to be clubbed over the head. He died not long after of a brain embolism. Later, he would be revealed to be Andrew Hawke.

WAIT AND NOW YOU DROP THIS ON ME.

One of the first superheroes was the man who touched him at the boat!!! Did he give him his power??? DId touching him grant him powers??? What???

But then what about all the other people who got powers afterwards??. I’m sure he wasn’t there for them all??? WHAT IS GOING ON?? Was that just a coincidence??

“The golden age of the parahumans was thus short lived. They were not the deific figures they had appeared to be. Parahumans were, after all, people with powers, and people are flawed at their core. Government agencies took a firmer hand, and state-”

Can I just say that I fucking love how despite all their powers and grace, parahumans are just human, with all their virtues and flaws, and it was this that made people realize that they were not gods, just men?? That one of the superheroes of the golden age died from a simple hit to the head??

God, this is so great.

The television flicked off, and the screen went black, cutting the documentary off mid sentence. Danny Hebert sighed and sat down on the bed, only to stand just a moment later and resume pacing.

It was three fifteen in the morning, and his daughter Taylor was not in her bedroom.

WHAT. It was indeed a documentary! A documentary that Taylor’s dad was watching! While waiting for his daughter to come home (and her being presumably dealing with the fire demon situation)

What a way to link this to the main story

For the twentieth time, he felt the urge to ask his wife for help, for advice, for support. But her side of the bed was empty and it had been for some time. Daily, it seemed, he was struck by the urge to call her cell phone. He knew it was stupid – she wouldn’t pick up – and if he dwelt on that for too long, he became angry at her, which just made him feel worse.

Oh so Taylor doesn’t have a mom? ):

Poor Taylor and poor Danny... He seems to have regrets... I would say they broke up but the “she wouldn’t pick up” line makes me think she’s dead..

He wondered, even as he knew the answer, why he hadn’t gotten Taylor a cell phone. Danny didn’t know what his daughter was doing, what would drive her to go out at night. She wasn’t the type. He could tell himself that most fathers felt that way about their daughters, but at the same time, he knew. Taylor wasn’t social. She didn’t go to parties, she wouldn’t drink, she wasn’t even that interested in champagne when they celebrated the New Year together.

Hmm, Taylor doesn’t have a cellphone? Danny seems to have an issue with them..

Also damn. Taylor did this to free herself from her troubles and start her dreams but didn’t account for how she would make his father feel.... Probably didn’t even think on the possibility that he would wake up and she wouldn’t be there.

Two ominous possibilities kept nagging at him, both too believable. The first was that Taylor had gone out for fresh air, or even for a run. She wasn’t happy, especially at school, he knew, and exercise was her way of working through it. He could see her doing it on a Sunday night, with a fresh week at school looming. He liked that her running made her feel better about herself, that she seemed to be doing it in a reasonable, healthy way. He just hated that she had to do it here, in this neighborhood. Because here, a skinny girl in her mid-teens was an easy target for attack. A mugging or worse – he couldn’t even articulate the worst of the possibilities in his own thoughts without feeling physically sick. If she had gone out at eleven in the evening for a run and hadn’t come back by three in the morning, then it meant something had happened.

Damn, I feel the adult fear Danny is expierencing. Having a daughter to take care of, worring about horrible things happening to her, about her general happiness ...

This is very well written.

He glanced out the window again, at that corner of the house where the pool of illumination beneath the streetlight would let him see her approaching. Nothing.

Checking out over and over again to see if she has come back, knowing that each time you look and it isn’t so, it is yet another weight of worry over your weary shoulders....

The second possibility wasn’t much better. He knew Taylor was being bullied. Danny had found that out in January, when his little girl had been pulled out of school and taken to the hospital. Not the emergency room, but the psychiatric ward. She wouldn’t say by whom, but under the influence of the drugs they had given her to calm down, she had admitted she was being victimized by bullies, using the plural to give him a clue that it was a they and not a he or a she. She hadn’t mentioned it – the incident or the bullying – since. If he pushed, she only tensed up and grew more withdrawn. He had resigned himself to letting her reveal the details in her own time, but months had passed without any hints or clues being offered.

Oh god, they bullied her so bad she went to the phychiatric ward??? What the hell!??

Oh my god those three fucking monsters. And Danny has been tormenting himself over all this since! Wanting to help but not wanting to intrude in such personal matters...

There was precious little Danny could do on the subject, either. He had threatened to sue the school after his daughter had been taken to the hospital, and the school board had responded by settling, paying her hospital bills and promising they would look out for her to prevent such events from occurring in the future. It was a feeble promise made by a chronically overworked staff and it didn’t do a thing to ease his worries. His efforts to have her change schools had been stubbornly countered with rules and regulations about the maximum travel times a student was allowed to have between home and a given school. The only other school within a reasonable distance of Taylor’s place of residence was Arcadia High, and it was already desperately overcrowded with more than two hundred students on a list requesting admittance.

Ugh schools being so useless is also very realistic, sadly....

It sucks and everyone refuses to help.

With all that in mind, when his daughter disappeared until the middle of the night, he couldn’t shake the idea that the bullies might have lured her out with blackmail, threats or empty promises. He only knew about the one incident, the one that had landed her in the hospital, but it had been grotesque. It had been implied, but never elaborated on, that more had been going on. He could imagine these boys or girls that were tormenting his daughter, egging one another on as they came up with more creative ways to humiliate or harm her. Taylor hadn’t said as much aloud, but whatever had been going on had been mean, persistent and threatening enough that Emma, Taylor’s closest friend for years, had stopped spending time with her. It galled him.

Aaaaaa, if you only knew!!! This is so sadly ironic, Emma’s got more to do with this than you are even aware of...

And what the hell did they do that time???

Impotent. Danny was helpless where it counted. There was no action he could take – his one call to the police at two in the morning had only earned him a tired explanation that the police couldn’t act or look for her without something more to go on. If his daughter was still gone after twelve hours, he’d been told, he should call them again. All he could do was wait and pray with his heart in his throat that the phone wouldn’t ring, a police officer or nurse on the other end ready to tell him what had happened to his daughter.

Ugh, what he is living though is just... awful.

He’s completely helpless to her daughter when she might be in need (or at least that’s what he thinks) and he’s waiting for a phone call telling him that something terrible has happened, and for his life to stop making sense.

Fuck

The slightest of vibrations in the house marked the escape of the warm air in the house to the cold outdoors, and there was a muffled whoosh as the kitchen door shut again. Danny Hebert felt a thrill of relief coupled with abject fear. If he went downstairs to find his daughter, would he find her hurting or hurt? Or would his presence make things worse, her own father seeing her at her most vulnerable after humiliation at the hands of bullies? She had told him, in every way except articulating it aloud, that she didn’t want that. She had pleaded with him, with body language and averted eye contact, unfinished sentences and things left unsaid, not to ask, not to push, not to see, when it came to the bullying. He couldn’t say why, exactly. Home was an escape from that, he’d suspected, and if he recognized the bullying, made it a reality here, maybe she wouldn’t have that relief from it. Perhaps it was shame, that his daughter didn’t want him to see her like that, didn’t want to be that weak in front of him. He really hoped that wasn’t the case.

Oh Taylor has returned after the Armsmaster talk!! Yess

And now Danny doesn’t know if to approach her for if he sees her in her weakest moment, he thinks it would break his daughter even more

Damn being Danny is suffering, at least today! Worse thing is, Taylor must be feeling realtively happy after being owed a favour by a famous hero and helping stop a villain...

So he ran his fingers through his hair once more and sat down on the corner of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands on his head, and stared at his closed bedroom door. His ears were peeled for the slightest clue. The house was old, and it hadn’t been a high quality building when it had been new, so the walls were thin and the structure prone to making noise at every opportunity. There was the faintest sound of a door closing downstairs. The bathroom? It wouldn’t be the basement door, with no reason for her to go down there, and he couldn’t imagine it was a closet, because after two or three minutes, the same door opened and closed again.

It was probably the basement, to hide her costume again.

After something banged on the kitchen counter, there was little but the occasional groan of floorboards. Five or ten minutes after she had come in, there was the rhythmic creak of the stairs as she ascended. Danny thought about clearing his throat to let her know he was awake and available should she knock on his door, but decided against it. He was being cowardly, he thought, as if his clearing of his throat would give reality to his fears.

Her door shut carefully, almost inaudibly, with the slightest tap of door on doorframe. Danny stood, abruptly, opening his door, ready to cross the hall and knock on her door. To verify that his daughter was okay.

Aaaaaa this hurts! If only you could talk to each other! The worse part is I know Taylor would be distressed if Danny tried to talk with her! She would worry about her cover being blown, about having to explain herself or even just about making her father worry!

He was stopped by the smell of jam and toast. She had made a late night snack. It filled him with relief. He couldn’t imagine his daughter, after being mugged, tormented or humiliated, coming home to have toast with jam as a snack. Taylor was okay, or at least, okay enough to be left alone.

He let out a shuddering sigh of relief and retreated to his room to sit on the bed.

Yes!! At least now he has some proof that things are somewhat ok : D

Relief became anger. He was angry at Taylor, for making him worry, and then not even going out of her way to let him know she was okay. He felt a smouldering resentment towards the city, for having neighborhoods and people he couldn’t trust his daughter to. He hated the bullies that preyed on his daughter. Underlying it all was frustration with himself. Danny Hebert was the one person he could control in all of this, and Danny Hebert had failed to do anything that mattered. He hadn’t gotten answers, hadn’t stopped the bullies, hadn’t protected his daughter. Worst of all was the idea that this might have happened before, with him simply sleeping through it rather than laying awake.

Damn, this still hurts.

Danny you are a good father, you worry about your daughter so much. Don’t hate yourself for feeling useless. It’s a bad situation overall.

He stopped himself from walking into his daughter’s room, from shouting at her and demanding answers, even if it was what he wanted, more than anything. Where had she been, what had she been doing? Was she hurt? Who were these people that were tormenting her? He knew that by confronting her and getting angry at her, he would do more harm than good, would threaten to sever any bond of trust they had forged between them.

He wants to be more of a father, to demand answers and try to protect her, to see if she’s doing something self-destructive or dangerous, but he’s afraid that he’ll lose her if he does that. That their bond will be irreparably damaged...

Danny’s father had been a powerful, heavyset man, and Danny hadn’t gotten any of those genes. Danny had been a nerd when the term was still young in popular culture, stick thin, awkward, short sighted, glasses, bad fashion sense. What he had inherited was his father’s famous temper. It was quick to rise and startling in its intensity. Unlike his father, Danny had only ever hit someone in anger twice, both times when he was much younger. That said, just like his father, he could and would go off on tirades that would leave people shaking. Danny had long viewed the moment he’d started to see himself as a man, an adult, to be the point in time where he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t ever lose his temper with his family. He wouldn’t pass that on to his child the way his father had to him.

“Unlike his father”... Oh

Oh no.

Danny you are not him, you are better than him. You seem like a wonderful man!

Seems Taylor inherited her tall, thin physique from him.

He had never broken that oath with Taylor, and knowing that was what kept him contained in his room, pacing back and forth, red in the face and wanting to punch something. While he’d never gotten angry at her, never screamed at her, he knew Taylor had seen him angry. Once, he had been at work, talking to a mayor’s aide. The man had told Danny that the revival projects for the Docks were being cancelled and that, contrary to promises, there were to be layoffs rather than new jobs for the already beleaguered Dockworkers. Taylor had been spending the morning in his office on the promise that they would go out for the afternoon, and had been in a position to see him fly off the handle in the worst way with the man. Four years ago, he had lost his temper with Annette for the first time, breaking his oath to himself. That had been the last time he had seen her. Taylor hadn’t been there to see him shouting at her mother, but he was fairly certain she’d heard some of it. It shamed him.

This makes it seem like they broke up. but.. if she really is dead... what a final conversation to have, angry with each other. No wonder he seems to have a lot of regrets with all of that. And with Taylor seeing him like he saw his father as well...

The third and last time that he had lost his temper where Taylor had been in a position to know had been when she had been hospitalized following the incident in January. He’d screamed at the school’s principal, who had deserved it, and at Taylor’s then-Biology teacher, who probably hadn’t. It had been bad enough that a nurse had threatened to call for a police officer, and Danny, barely mollified, had stomped from the hallway to the hospital room to find his daughter more or less conscious and wide eyed in reaction. Danny harbored a deep fear that the reason Taylor hadn’t offered any details on the bullying was out of fear he would, in blind rage, do something about it. It made him feel sick, the notion that he might have contributed something to his daughter’s self imposed isolation in how she was dealing with her problems.

He’s probably right about that, that Taylor doesn’t want his father involved...

January seemed a horrific month for them both.

It took Danny a long time to calm down, helped by telling himself over and over that Taylor was okay, that she was home, that she was safe. It was something of a blessing that, as the anger faded, he felt drained. He climbed into the left side of the bed, leaving the right side empty out of a habit he’d yet to break, and pulled the covers up around himself.

He would talk to Taylor in the morning. Get an answer of some sort.

The space he leaves for Taylor’s mom )):

Things will be better in the morning, sleep it off for now...

Also I wonder how Taylor will explain herself. Maybe she’s thinking about that.

He dreamed of the ocean.

We started this chapter with the ocean, and we seem to end on it, how poetic.

One ocean the scenery for a sight that would change the world forever, and the other a moment of peace in a storm of anxiety.

This interlude was incredibly good.

#Worm #worm liveblog #worm parahumans #parahumans liveblog #wildbow #parahumans #arc 1 #Worm int1

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newagesispage · 4 years

Text

MARCH 2020

PAGE RIB

The Stones are touring the U.S. again.

*****

Paul Reubens is touring with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

*****

Al Franken is touring.

*****

Keenan Thompson and Hasan Minhaj are bringing comedy back to the White House Correspondents dinner on April 5.

*****

Days alert: There is some casting news but most of this won’t show up until the fall. Word is a couple of newbies will be Remington Hoffman who will play Li Shin, son of Mr. Shin and Emily O’Brien may join the cast. Nadia Bjorlin (Chloe) may be on her way back. Let’s bring the original Phillip back for her!!! Brandon Barash (Stefan) will return as well as Louise Sorel ( Vivian )and Alison Sweeney ( Sami). Judi Evans is headed back. Will she play Adrienne or Bonnie?? It looks like Casey Moss (JJ), Freddie Smith (Sonny), Chandler Massey (Will) and Galen Gering (Rafe) mill head out for awhile.

*****

It looks like Friends freaks will finally get their reunion on HBO. I am glad they aren’t bringing the characters back and are just getting together to talk about their time together.

*****

Downhill hit theatres on Valentine’s Day with Will Ferrell, Julia Louis- Dreyfus and Zoe Chao. The film was written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.

*****

The more I see of it, the more I LOVE Stumptown, the best show that nobody seems to know about. Please renew ABC!!!!!

*****

So.. Rush Limbaugh got the Medal of Freedom. Oh my.

*****

Shadow Inc. owned by former Clinton and Obama staffers made an app that thoroughly fucked up the Iowa caucus. It was good at calculating the results but not delivering them. And hey.. Wolf Blitzer, stay off the phone with people that are trying to get those results. Let them just do their job!!

*****

Brooklyn 99 is back and Vanessa Bayer is there!!!

*****

Rod Blagojevich is out and hitting every show that will have him. Trump pardoned him along with 10 other criminals including Ed DeBartolo Jr., Mike Milken and Bernard Kerik.

*****

Forty thousand kids won’t get free lunch because Trump threw them off food stamps. The two usually go hand in hand. Getting food stamps automatically sets a kid up for the free lunch program.

*****

Over 1000 former DOJ officials have asked Bill Barr to resign.** 70 former Senators have written an open letter to congress to tell them they are not fulfilling their congressional duties.**” Yoo Hoo! Bush, Clinton, Carter, Obama, you’re up.” –Patricia Arquette

*****

Pete Davidson and Kaia Gerber have split.

*****

Indiana Beach is closing after 94 years.

*****

Denny Hamlin won the 2020 Daytona 500.

*****

Can’t we get some real gigs for Rainn Wilson and Curtis Armstrong? Ok, so Cyrtis Armstrong was on Stumptown so thank goodness for that! They can do better than Dominoes and Little Caesars ads. And how funny is it that Dominoes, known for its very Chrustian owners use a Risky Business ( a film about prostitutes) ad for their product. Hmm.

*****Hey.. Comics, quit bringing up Trump and his former womanizing. It didn’t work with Clinton and it won’t work here. People just don’t seem to care. Focus on the real damage he is doing.

*****

Scary Clown is working on opening nearly a million acres of land in Utah for energy exploration that had been a National monument. Redford and Romney can’t be happy about that.

*****

A new animated series from a brand new production company owned by Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph looks promising. Look for The Hospital.

*****

Southern Illinois University is giving Bob Odenkirk an honorary degree.

*****

Ukranian immigrants Lt. Col. Vindman and his twin brother are out. Ambassador to the EU Sonland is out.

*****

The Democrats had a debate on Feb. 7 . At Andrew Yang’s first chance to speak, he rehashed his stump speech. I mean, c’mon give us something new. There really seemed to be a restrained nervousness on the stage that night. Klobachar seemed too needy but she got great reviews. Biden called Buttigieg ‘a friend ‘ a couple of times. Mayor Pete did quite well. ** Deval Patrick is out** Andrew Yang is out.**Michael Bennet is out** Another debate was on Feb. 19.** Bloomberg/Yang? Is this true?

*****

Check out the new series, Hunters. It is awesome, funny and terrifying!

*****

Dozens of Native American women and girls have disappeared from Big Horn county, Montana over the last few years. The victims were later found dead and Trump has put a federal task force together.

*****

Grassley and Wyden are trying to get lower prescription drug prices but Moscow Mitch won’t bring the proposal to the floor. Others are looking to get some traction on HR3.

*****

JSW Steel has sued the Trump administration for refusing to exempt it from paying the levies on slabs of steel that the company imports.

*****

64 women have filed sexual harassment or discrimination lawsuits against Mike Bloomberg. I’m not a fan of the guy but it does seem sort of coincidental. It does not seem to matter cuz all his ads seem to be working, he is picking up steam. Tom Steyer is gaining a bit of momentum as well.

*****

The corona virus has brought us Covid 19. 600 people are being held in quarantine camps that the military has set up. Italy has new cases and the disease is spreading. Scary Clown is trying to spin it all.

*****

ICE is being sent into sanctuary cities to cause trouble for immigrants.

*****

You have to check out Horse girl with Alison Brie, Molly Shannon and Matthew Gray Gubler on Netflix .

*****

Rapper Larry Sanders AKA LV is letting us in on a miscarriage of justice he has had to live thru. LV, best known for his work on Coolio’s Gangsters Paradise, was approached by police and later put on the Calgang database. The practice put about 80,000 mostly African Americans on a sort of gang list. In a 2016 audit it was found that there were many inaccuracies including the names of babes who could not possibly be gang affiliated.

*****

Nature does not need people. People need nature. –Harrison Ford

*****

The Clark bar is back. The roll out has started in Pittsburgh and will soon spread across the country.

*****

Scientists have found some turtle fossils that are the size of a car in South America.

*****

U can donate to the Trump campaign and may win a yaqut and hunting trip with Don Jr. The Beach Boys will perform.

*****

The Oscars were held Feb. 9. Brad Pitt and the production design team won for Once upon a Time in Hollywood. Woo Hoo! Word is that Pitt has hired a speech writer to write his acceptances. JoJo Rabbit won for adapted screenplay. Little Women won for Little Women and Toy Story 4 for animated film. Laura Dern won best supporting actress. Renee Zellweger and Joaquin Phoenix too home the top actor prizes. Parasite surprised everybody and won best pic and got Bong Joon Ho a best director statue. My best dressed were Billy Porter, Antonio Banderes and his date, Janelle Monae ( her opening seemed to make some in the audience uncomfortable), Robert DeNiro, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Geena Davis, Regina King, Charlize Theron, Adam Driver, Joanne Tucker, Cynthia Erivo, Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Kathy Bates, I don’t know what Kristen Wiig and Idina Menzel were thinking. Wiig always has a unique style so I have to admire that. ** The ratings were down. I have heard people saying they just don’t watch award shows or late night shows anymore because they are afraid things will get political. Funny, that is part of the reason I watch!

*****

Tom Papa was pontificating about a real dog show that should have REAL dogs. It would make a great weekly show with people bringing on their dogs.

*****

The goalies of the Hurricanes were out of commission and David Ayres, the Zamboni driver was brought in to help and the won against the Maple Leafs. Woo Hoo!!

*****

Hooray for New Hampshire and their use of paper ballots. Things in the campaign got a little shook up with Bernie taking the top followed by Pete and Amy.

*****

2 years of research in Canada has brought the announcement of a new discovery. Skull fragments that were cleaned and collected about 10 years ago have been named Thanatotheristes or the reaper of death. The discovery helps us all learn more about the early times of Tyrannosaurids, a sub group that includes T.Rex.

*****

New Jersey has a ban on self- serve pumps and another state is talking about getting in on the action. The gas station attendant act has been proposed in Illinois.

*****

Van Jones was right when he said we shouldn’t give Trump any press coverage for a week. He would hate it. Trump loves the old adage of bad publicity is better than none because he just must have attention. It would never work for they just can’t resist.** Joe Mcguire is out after he warned of Russian interference. If you want to keep your job in this administration, do not tell the truth. Now at the Department of National Intelligence is Johnny Mcentee , a 29 year old former football player who worked on the campaign. He immediately called department heads and said he wanted lists of never Trumpers in their offices. ** And who is in charge of weeding out the people in the government who may be disloyal to Scary Clown? Well, it is none other than Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence. She calls it the list of snakes. Trump is now saying he even wants liberal judges on the Supreme Court to recuse themselves when it comes to “Trump related cases”. It just keeps getting worse.

*****

Trump had fun in India. He should, his business has 5 projects going there right now worth 1.5 billion.

*****

Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape and criminal sexual assault. He was not found guilty of all the charges that included predatory behavior.

*****

Andrew Yang is a new correspondent at CNN. He tells us that he is getting word from former donors that Bloomberg is calling those big donors. Allegedly he is telling them they do not have to donate to his campaign because he can afford his own campaign but he still won’t forget them. He would like them to save their money and not give money to other democrats running either.** And I am so sick of talking heads trying to tell us to play it safe. We are not as stupid as we look, thank you!! ** Now there is a firestorm about Bernie telling the world that the education program that Castro implemented was a good thing. I understand the anger and it could not have come at a worse time and he did it to himself. BUT.. We are adults and we have to be able to talk about things as they really are, not in sound bites. Castro sucked and history teaches us that bad people do good things occasionally and good people do bad things once in a while. ** It seems that everyone was in agreement that we would all gather behind the winner of the democratic campaign to beat Trump. Suddenly when it could be Bernie, everybody is bitching.

*****

This month held 2 more Democratic debates. The Nevada debate got pretty heated. I see that Mayor Pete and Bloomberg are lefties (left handed that is). Pete always looked poised and articulate which I appreciate and he got in a good one when he mentioned that the party should choose someone who is actually a democrat. Bernie seemed a little rattled by that. Later Pete really dressed down Amy Klobuchar and made himself look like a dick. Joe Biden jumped in with his credits occasionally but often seemed a bit lost. He slammed back that they were all talking about the health care plane he helped to create and that he himself had dealt with the Mexican President. His name came up after it was mentioned that Amy could not remember the President’s name. The gloves were off with Bloomberg as Elizabeth Warren called him out on Billionaires and NDA’s. I loved the interaction but realistically Mr. Mike can’t just release people from agreements they made in an NDA, especially if it did not involve him. Bloomberg sounded pompous and clueless about the world outside of his company. He got a moan when he said he couldn’t exactly use turbo tax and when he said he may have told a few jokes that women didn’t like. He brushed off his taxes much like Trump does. The former mayor of NY called out socialists as communists. Klobuchar had the best comeback of the night when she was told her health care plan could fit on a post it. She proclaimed that the post it was invented in her state of Minnesota. Again, there were people shouting from the audience as Joe tried to talk. C’mon give everybody an equal chance.

*****

The South Carolina debate was fiery as well. The CBS debate was hosted by Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell. Bloomberg was booed right off the bat about Russia helping Bernie but he late had many cheers. He and Biden and Steyer had some real support there. Tom Steyer was actually quite impressive and seemed well spoken. He was the only one who brought up the impeachment. He had a great point that we all know that republicans who did not convict Trump are complicit in the Russian meddling. Then he ruined it all by being alarmist with his fear. He warned us off the former republican and the socialists. I loved Bernie’s ideas about small business’s getting in on the marijuana business and not letting big corporations taking it over. He is also the only one in debates that I have seen consistently bring up Native Americans. Biden again kept jumping in to tell us that he did this or that. Amy disagreed about a bill he claimed to have written. Warren said “dig in” numerous times. She went for the jugular with Bloomberg when she said a former female employee of his said to “kill it” in response to her pregnancy. He denied it but it sure is memorable. She did make great points that he has given much money to Linsey Graham’s campaign as well as other republican runs including against her. BTW he also gave 2.3 mil to Rick Snyder, the Gov of Michigan after the water crisis was well known. I love that Amy is always saying that we shouldn’t fight amongst ourselves but she just does not have the votes so she needs to go. Bernie got some boos about guns for he seems the softest in that area.

*****

Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary in a big way.

*****

Dick Van Dyke, Sarah Silverman and Public Enemy among others will be at the Bernie Sanders rally in L.A. on March 1.

*****

Just think what the 400 million that Bloomberg spent on his campaign could have done for the debt of the average American. Instead of a campaign for a presidency that he can’t win, he could have helped so many get a leg up.

*****

I don’t understand why “respected” journalists like Chuck Todd don’t throw W H reps off the set when they disrespect him or his colleagues with fake news jabs.

*****

Bob Moore of Bob’s Red Mill is giving his company away to his employees. Now, that’s a boss!!

*****

Bone, Thugs and Harmony have made a deal with Buffalo Wild Wings to rename themselves Boneless thugs and Harmony. The publicity stunt is to promote boneless wings.

*****

NASA is hiring.

*****

Scotland has made feminine sanitary products free!!

*****

Is this true? There were pigeons in Nevada with MAGA hats glued to their heads??

*****

The final Criminal Minds has aired. CBS often aired double episodes which made it seem like they really wanted to get rid of it. Kirsten Vangsness and Erica Messer wrote the final episode which seemed to give special attention to Penelope and Reid as they were the originals. The other characters seemed a little overlooked but they all had happy endings. Where was Reid’s new girlfriend? I was hoping to see Shemar Moore but it was great to see Reisgraf and Howell which are old favorites.

*****

Animal Kingdom returns to TNT on May 28.

*****

So there is a bit of a mess with the Roger Stone sentencing. Trump is hopping mad about the long sentence recommendation, Barr is said to be pretending to spar with the Prez, the DOJ is backing down and people are resigning.

*****

R.I.P. Shirley Jean Cade, Robert Conrad, Katherine Johnson, Lyle Mays, B. Smith, A.E. Hotchner, Bashir Jackson, Ja’net Dubois, Pat Agee, victims of the Molson Coors shooting and Orson Bean.

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godzillajuniorreborn · 5 years

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Godzilla King of the Monsters review

In memory of my father. Even though we didn't always see eye-to-eye, without him, I would've never become the fan of Godzilla I am today. Thanks, Dad.

Here it is, my belated review of the recent American Godzilla movie that serves as the sequel to Gareth Edwards' 2014 cinematic reboot and the third installment in the Monsterverse. I saw this movie on Sunday with my mom and brother. Let me just say this to the critics who bashed this movie. I am so sorry this movie doesn't pander to your standards. I'm sorry this movie doesn't exactly have a hidden agenda for you to latch on to. I'm sorry this movie was made for the fans of Godzilla and Kaiju in general. But, you should have known, after seeing the trailers, this movie was going to be a monster slugfest. I also find your critiques very hypocritical since you're more willing to bash this movie yet give praise to the MCU despite those movies not being in the realm of reality. With that said, let's get on to the review.

Story: Five years have passed since mankind bore witness to the rise of Godzilla and the very staggering realization that monsters do exist. Now, humanity is aware of the gigantic beasts known as Titans. However, a dark plan to overthrow humanity and return the rule of Earth to the Titans is underway as an eco-terrorist and rogue Monarch agent let loose a powerful, dragon-like Titan locked away within Antarctica named King Ghidorah whose very presence can summon Category 6 hurricanes all over the world. As humanity faces a worldwide monster apocalypse, Monarch finds itself in a race against time to stop the evil Ghidorah as Godzilla and the other Titans, including the lepidopteran Mothra and the pterosaur-like Rodan, are on a collision course for a battle to decide the fate of the world and who reigns on top as "King of the Monsters".

Let's start with the cons. Just a warning, there WILL be spoilers:

1. The pacing: The first half of the movie feels like it goes a little bit too fast. In the first thirty minutes, we are introduced to Mothra, Ghidorah's awakening in Antarctica as well as his first battle with Godzilla, Rodan's introduction, Godzilla getting incapacitated by the Oxygen Destroyer, and Ghidorah taking control over the other Titans. Luckily, the movie slows down in the second act and allows the audience to catch their breath.

2. Not a lot of Titans: Despite the movie having a total of about twenty Titans, the only ones to get any screen time dedicated to them are the Main Four (Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah) as well as four new monsters (Behemoth, Scylla, Methuselah, and Bosmuto). That's a total of eight Kaiju out of at least twenty with the majority either being names on computer screens or a cameo from Kong. In addition, Rodan and Mothra don't appear that much in the film, mostly taking a backseat to Godzilla and King Ghidorah.

3. Some scenes feel incomplete: For example, there is a scene where Madison (Millie Bobby Brown's character) steals the ORCA, a device meant to communicate with Titans designed by her mother and father, and she does so with little to no effort at all, despite it being a key component in Alan Jonah's (Charles Dance's character) plans. You'd think for such a key instrument, he'd have someone at least guarding it. Heck, in the novelization, there's one guy protecting it who Madison takes out with a taser. In the movie, Maddie just swipes the device with no opposition whatsoever.

4. Emma Russell's Plan: In this movie Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), after losing her son Andrew to Godzilla during the Battle of San Francisco, apparently went mad and decided to give the planet back to the Titans and is working with Alan Jonah, a former army colonel turned eco-terrorist to set about bringing forth a Kaiju apocalypse by setting loose the Titans from their hibernation and having them fix the planet's ecosystem. Yeah, while it is obvious she's being driven by five years worth of grief and she's not in the right mental state, here are two things wrong with her plan (Heck, even Jonah who is the film's main human villain calls her out on this.):

The Titan you have spear-heading this operation is a three-headed dragon who we later find out is from space and was so feared, ancient people refused to go into depth about him (which should be a major red flag that nobody wants to even acknowledge his existence).

Emma says the radiation brought up from the Titans results in new plant-life. Okay, this lady clearly hasn't heard of the effects radiation has on plant-life. Three words: Red. Forests. Chernobyl.

Granted, she kinda gets proven right, for as soon as the Titans are free, the world gets better, but, she was still willing to kick-start global genocide. When a former British Colonel turned eco-warrior is calling you out on your crap, then something's gone wrong.

Now, the pros:

1. The four main Kaiju: Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah are all perfectly realized. As much as I loved the 2014 reboot, I felt like Godzilla could've had a few more scenes to it to flesh out his character. Here, Godzilla is the main character and we get a better grasp at his personality: a weathered, determined king who feels the weight of keeping the natural order in balance on his shoulders. Speaking of personalities, the other three Toho Kaiju have their own distinct personalities, though one gets a category on his own (and I'm pretty sure you know which one) with the stand outs being Rodan who has a hot-headed rogue feel to him but tends to showcase his loyalty to the current Alpha Titan while Mothra is purely benevolent and seems to have a touch of Anguirus' personality with her being loyal to Godzilla alone. I also think this may be the most aggressive incarnation of the Goddess of Peace since GMK.

2. King Ghidorah: The 1991 Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah film was the first Godzilla movie I ever saw, thus King Ghidorah was the first Godzilla villain I saw and he was TERRIFYING. I mean, he's a three-headed dragon the size of a building, that alone is scary. Michael Dougherty succeeded in reminding me why Ghidorah was a nightmare of my childhood. This version of the King of Terror is the most evil I've seen of the character, even more so than Grand King Ghidorah (and that's saying a lot considering that version of Ghidorah was willing to kidnap kids so he could suck them of their life-force as a snack). I like how each of his three heads have their own personalites; the center head being the cold, calculating, arrogant leader, the right head is smarter yet also more aggressive, and the left is an over-achieving, psychotic manchild that has to be kept in line by the center head. In addition, this is the one film villain of 2019 who is evil just for the sake of being evil. There is NOTHING worth sympathizing over. For starters, he's an alien dragon (Yeah, that's right, alien.They don't mince words on that either.) who wants to terraform Earth into his own liking (and it's implied he's done this to other planets as well). He has no conscience, no sympathy, no empathy, and no mercy. He's evil. Nothing more, nothing less. Putting it simply, Ghidorah is that one villain whom you're going to love simply on the grounds of how despicable he is.

3. The Music: The score for the movie by Bear McCeary is excellent. In addition to the classic Ifukube themes for Godzilla and Mothra, it also gives themes for Rodan and Ghidorah that fit them with Rodan having a fast-paced, bombastic theme and Ghidorah having a theme with the Heart Sutra as part of his leitmotif that makes him feel all the more demonic. I also like the heroic theme given to Monarch.

4. The Human Characters: IMO, I found the human characters surprisingly likable and engaging. They were fleshed out (well, much more than you'd expect in a typical Godzilla movie) and had their own story arcs. My favorite characters would have to be Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), Ilene Chen (Zhang Ziyi), Alan Jonah, and Rick Stanton (Brad Whitford). Rick especially since his jokes are actually pretty good. I also like Alan considering he's not your typical Godzilla human villain who wants to use the Orca and turn the Titans into weapons of war, rather, he comes off more as a Miyazaki villain like Kushana or Lady Eboshi, in that he has good intentions (he's sick and tired of humanity's nonsense and it would be better if the Titans took back the planet), it's just his execution of this plan involved the near extinction of human civilization and the reliance on a three-headed, psychotic dragon from space. Also, Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) is pretty much the anti-Haruo Sakaki. He holds a grudge against Godzilla, but even then he knows it's downright suicidal to try and fight him and, in the end, realizes the Big G's the only thing standing in the way of Ghidorah's machinations. Heck, some of his actions save more people as opposed to Haruo whose blind hatred towards Godzilla got people killed.

5. NO! POLITICAL! AGENDA!: Seriously, am I the only one sick of seeing overly PC elements in movies nowadays? I mean, I get it, there should be more representation, but when those themes bring a film to a screeching halt, it feels more like propaganda posing as entertainment. Luckily, KOTM doesn't do that. If anything, it sticks closer to the themes of the Godzilla franchise (coexistence with Nature and what not) and the only political jab it made was a mention of a Titan attacking Stone Mountain. However, it's so brief and so quick, you'd miss it and it wouldn't change a damn thing. Heck, the only actual politics in the movie is a conference scene you'd expect to see in a Godzilla film. Not only that, but none of the main female characters (Emma, Madison, Ilene etc) are Mary Sues, not even Mothra who is the most powerful of the main female leads (yes, Mothra is technically a character) is all powerful. Emma, despite her stupid, STUPID plan, is clearly not thinking straight due to five years of mourning her son and going extreme with Serizawa's belief of the Titans bringing balance to Earth clearly isn't helping. So, yeah, this movie isn't trying to get Woke points, it's trying to tell a story.

6. The Action Sequences: Aside from one scene, most of the action in this movie is probably some of the best out of any Godzilla film, heck, it's some of the best action I've seen in a Kaiju movie in general. And, trust me, if the anime Godzilla trilogy left a bad taste in your mouth (not that I blame you), you can rest comfortably that we get a proper fight between Godzilla and King Ghidorah. Also, this is the first time we get to see Godzilla and Ghidorah really go at it.

Overall:

This movie was exactly what I wanted to see from an American Godzilla film. It was also the nice little pick-me-up after the utter disappointment that was the anime Godzilla trilogy. Frankly, I think Kong better have something up his sleeves when he and Godzilla have their cinematic rematch next year.

#ooc #godzilla #godzilla: king of the monsters #king ghidorah #rodan #mothra #monsterverse #review

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yobaba30 · 4 years

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If this election turns out to be just between a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath, we will be in a terrible, terrible place as a country. How do we prevent that?

That’s all I am thinking about right now. My short answer is that the Democrats have to do something extraordinary — forge a national unity ticket the likes of which they have never forged before. And that’s true even if Democrats nominate someone other than Bernie Sanders.

What would this super ticket look like? Well, I suggest Sanders — and Michael Bloomberg, who seems to be his most viable long-term challenger — lay it out this way:

“I want people to know that if I am the Democratic nominee these will be my cabinet choices — my team of rivals. I want Amy Klobuchar as my vice president. Her decency, experience and moderation will be greatly appreciated across America and particularly in the Midwest. I want Mike Bloomberg (or Bernie Sanders) as my secretary of the Treasury. Our plans for addressing income inequality are actually not that far apart, and if we can blend them together it will be great for the country and reassure markets. I want Joe Biden as my secretary of state. No one in our party knows the world better or has more credibility with our allies than Joe. I will ask Elizabeth Warren to serve as health and human services secretary. No one could bring more energy and intellect to the task of expanding health care for more Americans than Senator Warren.

“I want Kamala Harris for attorney general. She has the toughness and integrity needed to clean up the corrupt mess Donald Trump has created in our Justice Department. I would like Mayor Pete as homeland security secretary; his intelligence and military background would make him a quick study in that job. I would like Tom Steyer to head a new cabinet position: secretary of national infrastructure. We’re going to rebuild America, not just build a wall on the border with Mexico. And I am asking Cory Booker, the former mayor of Newark, to become secretary of housing and urban development. Who would bring more passion to the task of revitalizing our inner cities than Cory?

“I am asking Mitt Romney to be my commerce secretary. He is the best person to promote American business and technology abroad — and it is vital that the public understands that my government will be representing all Americans, including Republicans. I would like Andrew Yang to be energy secretary, overseeing our nuclear stockpile and renewable energy innovation. He’d be awesome.

“I am asking Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to serve as our U.N. ambassador. Can you imagine how our international standing would improve with youth worldwide with her representing next-gen America? And I want Senator Michael Bennet, the former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, to be my secretary of education. No one understands education reform better than he does. Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna would be an ideal secretary of labor, balancing robots and workers to create “new collar” jobs.

“Finally, I am asking William H. McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who commanded the U.S. Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014 and oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to be my defense secretary. Admiral McRaven, more than any other retired military officer, has had the courage and integrity to speak out against the way President Trump has politicized our intelligence agencies.

Only last week, McRaven wrote an essay in The Washington Post decrying Trump’s firing of Joe Maguire as acting director of national intelligence — the nation’s top intelligence officer — for doing his job when he had an aide brief a bipartisan committee of Congress on Russia’s renewed efforts to tilt our election toward Trump.

“Edmund Burke,” wrote McRaven, “the Irish statesman and philosopher, once said: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”

If Bernie or Bloomberg or whoever emerges to head the Democratic ticket brings together such a team of rivals, I am confident it will defeat Trump in a landslide. But if progressives think they can win without the moderates — or the moderates without the progressives — they are crazy. And they’d be taking a huge risk with the future of the country by trying.

And I mean a huge risk. Back in May 2018, the former House speaker John Boehner declared: “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

It’s actually not napping anymore. It’s dead.

And I will tell you the day it died. It was just last week, when Trump sacked Maguire for advancing the truth and replaced him with a loyalist, an incompetent political hack, Richard Grenell. Grenell is the widely disliked U.S. ambassador to Germany, a post for which he is also unfit. Grenell is now purging the intelligence service of Trump critics. How are we going to get unvarnished, nonpolitical intelligence analysis when the message goes out that if your expert conclusions disagree with Trump’s wishes, you’re gone?

I don’t accept, but can vaguely understand, Republicans’ rallying around Trump on impeachment. But when Republicans, the self-proclaimed national security party — folks like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton — don’t lift a finger to stop Trump’s politicization of our first line of defense — the national intelligence directorate set up after 9/11 — then the Republican Party is not asleep. It’s dead and buried.

And that is why a respected, nonpartisan military intelligence professional like Bill McRaven felt compelled to warn what happens when good people are silent in the face of evil. Our retired generals don’t go public like that very often. But he was practically screaming, “This is a four-alarm fire, a category 5 hurricane.” And the G.O.P. response? Silence.

Veteran political analyst E.J. Dionne, in his valuable new book, “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country,” got this exactly right: We have no responsible Republican Party anymore. It is a deformed Trump personality cult. If the country is going to be governed responsibly, that leadership can come only from Democrats and disaffected Republicans courageous enough to stand up to Trump. It is crucial, therefore, argues Dionne, that moderate and progressive Democrats find a way to build a governing coalition together.

Neither can defeat the other. Neither can win without the other. Neither can govern without the other.

If they don’t join together — if the Democrats opt for a circular firing squad — you can kiss the America you grew up in goodbye.

#united states politics and government

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