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blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years

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Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler?

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’. The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #napoleon #french #french history #history #military history #bonaparte #france #historiography #republic #historians #personal

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summerspn · 4 years

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Gilmore Girls

Lorelai & Her Parents

At 16 Lorelai was rebellious against anything her parents did or said & she’s the same way even in Year in the Life where she’s in her late 40’s. She has zero open communication with her mom...still.

She never listens to her parents, avoids their calls, tries to get her daughter to be the go between on several occasions.

Lorelai whines, bitches & moans about her parents being the root of all evil. The way she talks we would expect them to be Joseph Stalin (a comparison she made herself in that magazine interview about the Inn).

However, we never see or hear anything that bad about her parents. Nothing unforgivable. They’re just normal loving parents who have strong opinions & are sometimes pushy.

Lorelai gave birth to Rory when she was 16. No parent would be thrilled at the idea their child just made their lives considerably more challenging for themselves. Parents generally want their kids to have better lives than they had.

In flashbacks we see Richard & Emily being good parents. Posh & proper they took parent in lots of events & rituals Lorelai didn’t like. Such as sitting for a portrait & wearing fancy dresses etc

Lorelai’s seen joking with Christopher & in good spirits. She’s not traumatized or being abused in any way.

We never see them being cruel, angry, or abusive to her. They definitely wanted her to follow suit. To do what they say...to listen...and to learn from them.

Lorelai rejected all of that. She’s not good at any of those things.

However they still seemed like good parents. Great even.

When they realize Lorelai’s pregnant they are shocked & disappointed. Immediately they jump into protective mode. Richard suggests helping Chris join the family & the kids could get married... his attempt to salvage her reputation. He knows how cruel people can be especially from the upper class elites whom of which can be petty.

Both Richard & Emily want to fix the mistake so they jump in. Christopher even said he wanted to marry Lorelai & he seemed excited about having the baby. Lorelai just looked annoyed at all of it.

We also see that she pushes them away again & again.

When she goes to the hospital alone they rush to be by her side. And she still acts annoyed. They wanted to help someone they love & she was annoyed!

In the flashbacks we see that Lorelai & baby Rory were living with Richard & Emily for at least a few weeks. Her parents seemed to be okay with the living situation.

A nice house, no rent, all expenses paid, and they mentioned a nanny...to which Lorelai felt she had to escape. What??

Seriously, she wanted zero help from everyone & anyone. That’s not just being independent that’s being blinded by pride.

And after her parents did everything for her, Lorelai runs away with baby Rory.

That’s completely selfish. I could imagine how painful that would be for her parents.

To make matters worse, it’s said several times in the early part of the series that Emily never got to see how Lorelai raised Rory...and that they barely ever got see or talk to Rory when she was little.

In fact, the first interaction we see of Rory & her grandparents it’s like Rory doesn’t know them. It’s like they’re being introduced to each other.

So...basically Lorelai didn’t try to have her parents involved in Rory’s life. She didn’t encourage a relationship with them - that is so incredibly spiteful & selfish.

When Emily finally meets the owner of the Independence Inn we see that she was upset about all that missing time. She didn’t have pictures of Lorelai or Rory during that time. It’s so...sad.

Season one has Rory getting into Chilton & it’s an excuse for her parents to get involved in their lives. They see it as an opportunity to get to know Rory. They pay for Chilton in exchange for Friday night dinners.

Even though they made a deal & Lorelai gave her word to have weekly dinners with her parents she still tries throughout the series to get out of them. It’s so rude & she’s so ungrateful.

Lorelai always whines about the dinners. But they were good! They get nice food, sit in comfort & have good company. She often looks like she’s having fun but later complains about them. There were only a handful of bad dinners in the series with her parents.

So why did she always complain about them?

Because she’s ungrateful for everything her parents did for her.

Good things Richard & Emily did for Lorelai:

* They raised her in a loving, stable home

* She had a good education

* They taught her good morals

* She was always fed & taken care of

* They tried to help when she was pregnant & provided support once the baby was born

* In season 1, Lorelai hurts her back & Emily takes care of her

* They paid for Chilton & Yale

* Their only request (or as Lorelai called it they ‘demanded’) to spend time with their daughter & grand daughter in exchange for the schools’ tuition.

* Despite not being invited by their daughter (because Lorelai assumes they wouldn’t want to go), both Richard & Emily attend Lorelai’s college graduation as the proudest parents in the world.

* They bought Rory an over the top high school graduation gift- a car- to which Lorelai barely thanked them.

* Richard taught Rory to golf & showed her around the country club.

* Richard was a mentor for a school project of Rory’s

* Emily encouraged Rory several times to make friends with her classmates

* Emily encouraged school involvement to help make those friends & for college. She stated something along the lines that it would help for everything.

* They remain friendly with Christopher (Rory’s father) even though he’s rarely around & they don’t like the fact he & Lorelai never got married. They know it’s important to be civil as he’s Rory’s father & they hope eventually the situation would improve.

* Emily is super nice to Jess upon their first meeting even though she thinks Rory is too good for him. She kept her opinion to herself, except when she had a private conversation with Lorelai.

* Emily helps Rory navigate parties & the DAR, making sure her grand daughter would be prepared for life of the upper society instead of leaving her to flounder.

* Emily prints out a list of tips for ways in which Rory can avoid getting stabbed in prison (during her community service)

* Richard defends Rory’s honour when he realizes Mitchum Huntzberger had upset her.

* Likewise Emily gives a great verbal thrashing to Shira Huntzberger in response to the woman having humiliated Rory

* Even when he’s not speaking with Lorelai, Richard helps take care of the insurance at the Dragonfly Inn.

* There were lots of warm family exchanges between them & Rory. Some warm exchanges between them & Lorelai too.

* When Rory ran to her grandparents, breaking down & basically begged them for help, they gave it to her. They took care of her.

* When Rory got arrested they never gave her a hard time or judged. They tried to help.

* They were still open to Logan being in Rory’s life even though his parents treated her poorly.

Not so good moments of theirs:

* Richard breaks business ties with Digger, going behind his back & working for his father

* Richard manipulates the situation so that while visiting Yale Rory has a meeting with the dean

* Emily throws the Yale (boys) party to try to get Rory to meet someone new as she’s too good for Dean (it worked, because she was too good for him)

* When they feared for Rory’s ‘virtue’. Old fashioned, yes. They felt her being a virgin until marriage was the way to go so they set up an awkward dinner with a pastor to talk sense into her. Good intentions but it was none of their business.

People have a lot of opinions about who was responsible for the rift between Lorelai & her parents.

What I think is this:

When Lorelai ran away with baby Rory, it was her fault. She took off, pushed them away & refused help.

Being rich & powerful, they could have won custody. All they had to do was get a private investigator to take pictures of the shed Lorelai & Rory were living in. Prove that Lorelai (who refused help from anyone) left Rory alone while she cleaned rooms at the Independence Inn.

It would be easy for them.

However, they didn’t do that. They actually gave Lorelai space & took what scraps of contact she was willing to give.

During the series (even with nothing triggering it) Lorelai pushes her parents away, bad mouths them, constantly hides big life events from them (her college graduation, not one but TWO engagements! , etc)...and she humiliated Emily by giving that mean interview about her when she should have talked about the Dragonfly Inn.

However, when Richard betrayed Digger, that caused tension. When he forced Rory to talk to the Yale Dean, it caused a rift. Not approving of Luke caused tension but they still supported Lorelai even though they didn’t like him.

Supporting Rory’s decision to drop out of school was huge. They supported her, thinking it was the right thing. Then Richard laid it out for Lorelai (because Rory was too chicken shit to stand up for her mom more than once a year 🤷‍♀️) .

It was what Rory wanted but Lorelai felt it was all her parents’ fault, which wasn’t true.

Emily even tried to encourage Rory to talk to Lorelai a few times. Finally getting through to her with the invitations to her birthday party.

And Lorelai showed up to the party & acted like she wanted to kill them. Emily asked how Luke was & Lorelai jumped down her throat...and of course that was when we realized that again Lorelai didn’t tell her parents she was going to marry Luke.

Another knife wound.

Emily & Richard are critical but they also learn & evolve. They both are pragmatic so while Emily was underhanded in inviting Christopher to the vow renewal, I get it. Emily wanted to see if she can piece the family back together - choosing one of the few times where she’s getting along with Lorelai. She probably thought that if he saw Lorelai at a wedding he’d want to marry her & vice versa. Kill two birds with one stone.

Yes it was shitty because Lorelai was with Luke; however, if that had been a healthy relationship (there were lots of issues) it wouldn’t have imploded the way it did. Later when the two have a healthier relationship both Richard & Emily are more accepting of Luke.

Even during Emily’s emotional breakdown where she wanted to buy that plane she suggested that Lorelai & Luke can use it - showing at that point she’d accepted the relationship.

So who was to blame for the rift?

Both...but mostly Lorelai.

While I can understand the argument that she had been raised in a way she didn’t like, you can’t place blame on that.

Lorelai felt suffocated at 16 but she didn’t just need space, she wanted to cruelly ditch her parents.

You definitely can’t blame her parents for the way she acted towards them at 30-something. Because adults are responsible for themselves. You have issues with someone? Talk! Communicate! Even if that involves arguing.

Suck it up, address the issues then figure out how to fix it.

I feel like Emily & Richard did this a lot. They struggled sometimes but eventually they worked things out. But Lorelai kept pushing them away & shut them out of her life.

Even in Year in the Life. She still resented her father so much that she couldn’t remember a single good memory about him at the funeral. Then she acted angry at Emily when she was upset. Emily had every right to be.

They go to therapy because after all these years they can’t talk to each other. Still. Well, we know Emily is very vocal so who could be to blame? Perhaps the fact Lorelai was keeping her therapy from Luke was a bit telling.

In any case, whomever you blame for the problems, I think we all can agree it would have been nice if the show had more flashbacks so we can see why Lorelai resented and (at times) hated her parents.

Nothing I saw in the series was enough to be that angry with them & to run away or barely see them in 16 years. Were they stifling? Yes. Controlling? A little bit but parents often are. Annoying? Yes.

Abusive, cruel, mean, neglectful? No, no, no, and no.

In my family, we talk & occasionally yell. We don’t have to like what each other is doing but hey that’s family. But we do try to talk. Sometimes things come up that annoys us but we deal with it.

Lorelai’s family wasn’t perfect. That’s fine, but why wouldn’t she want to see them? Why would she take a situation about her neurotic mother & think it was funny to tell perfect strangers & to compare herself to a murdering dictator?

You have to be pretty heartless to do that...even if Lorelai didn’t realize it would be in print. I don’t care how annoyed I get I would NEVER talk about my parents like that.

So, why does Lorelai? What happened to her that she thinks this is okay? What (if any) shady things did her parents do to deserve something like that?

I wish the show could have shown us because the absence of information just feels like Lorelai is cruel & vindictive

I personally think Lorelai just never grew up. She acts immature even in later seasons so I believe she has the same mentality as she did when she was 16. She assumes several times the worst about her parents when the were just being straight forward or asking simple questions.

Like, for example, Rory’s invitation to her birthday party. Lorelai assumes it was a manipulation by Emily but her daughter was just reaching out to her. Instead of checking to see if she was actually welcome she - like a child - ignores it & would rather miss Rory’s birthday then deal with 2 minutes of awkwardness on the phone to get clarification. She just assumes there is no possible way she’d ever be wrong. Keep in mind at this point Lorelai is supposed to be around 38.

She’s not a child, she’s not naive nor stupid. She’s merely self involved. She thinks how she thinks, never bends, & can’t possibly comprehend the fact that her parents genuinely love her & try any means in which they can see her & their grand daughter.

In later seasons we can see how heartbroken her parents were still about missing out on Lorelai’s life. Emily starts making suggestions about adding onto the Dragonfly Inn, by having a spa attached. Lorelai brushes it off like it was nothing but Emily was reaching out to her because she was worried she wouldn’t want to do Friday night dinners again.

And we see in season 7, when the girls attend Mia’s wedding that Emily was still upset by the separation all those years ago. She’s civil while trying to hide her pain. Lorelai was completely oblivious to how upset Emily was. Rory points that out & eventually Lorelai actually understands.

Some people aren’t fans of season 7 but I loved that episode because it showed Emily’s vulnerability & pain and we actually got to see some growth between Lorelai & Emily!

Year in the Life completely shit all over that of course.

The series finale was alright regarding how Lorelai is with her parents. They were in a good place & she reassured her mom that Friday night dinners would continue. Meaning, she would still be in their lives.

I had no complaints about that. Though I still wish we saw more about their past.

What I had hoped to see in Year in the Life was a solid relationship with Lorelai & Emily. After all those years, why wouldn’t they have progressed?

We saw hints that when Lorelai would take her head out of her butt, she actually enjoys time with her parents. Such as having fun with Emily at that fashion show.

And a lot of people get annoyed at their family as teenagers but once they’re grown up & moved out, they have a good relationship with them.

I wanted, in the Year in the Life, for Emily & Lorelai to still have their banter but be friendly. Meeting up to shop occasionally & such. But instead they’re still in a bad place? After ten years...really?

Seeing that was exhausting. Even as a 40-something woman Lorelai acted like a spoiled brat. Like a teenager, and her mom then treated her like one. It was stupid & disappointing.

#rory gilmore #tv serials #tv #entertaining #tv shows #alexis bledel #gilmore girls #keiko agena #lauren graham #lorelai gilmore #emily gilmore #richard gilmore #bishop #edward herrmann #jared padalecki

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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Ahem. As discussed, a prompt my good lady...Lucy and Flynn + fake married in Dubrovnik + the inevitable shenanigans...

Okay SO. On the plane over, there was something in the magazine about a website where tourists can go to Amsterdam and fake-marry a local for a day, so their new “spouse” can take them around the non-tourist parts of the city, and then they go their separate ways at dusk and it’s fun etc. I immediately decided that this needed a Garcy AU, for obvious reasons.

Lucy Preston wasn’t really planning on going to Croatia. In fact, she wasn’t exactly planning to go anywhere. But it’s been a rough few months to say the least – tenure meeting cancelled at Stanford, breaking up with Noah, Mom has to go back to the hospital for more tests and it isn’t looking good – and in a fit of late-night frustration, she decided to just fly somewhere over Thanksgiving break and forget about the clusterfuck that was her life for a bit. Somewhere warm, she wasn’t picky. She suggested that Amy go with her, but Amy had work and couldn’t get away, and by then, Lucy had already booked a ticket. She’s heard that Dubrovnik is beautiful, there is a university and a state archive there so she can theoretically disguise it as a research trip, and when she was running through the apparently deeply cursed Frankfurt airport to catch her connecting flight, a text popped up from Amy. Something that she thinks Lucy should try, just for shits and giggles. Some kind of app called Untourist.

Lucy took a look at it and decided that it was basically Tinder for tourists, even if the premise tried to be more classy than that. In short, you can pick a European city from the list (More Locations Coming Soon!, promises the popup), fill in some brief preference Q&As, and be matched with a local, who will fake-marry you in a ceremony complete with photos and then take you on a “honeymoon” for a day in the city. The idea is that you get to have a personal guide, explore places off the main drag – and presumably, if you hook up at the end, that’s a nice bonus, but not one that the app strictly advertises. It sees itself as promoting intercultural connections and lived experiences, rather than anything so ignominious as arranging casual sex with a hot foreigner. Apparently it got its start in Amsterdam, though, so this would not be surprising.

The split with Noah is still raw, and Lucy isn’t planning to use the app for that purpose – or indeed, at all. But after she has landed at the surprisingly tiny airport and has boarded the bus for the drive along the coast road to the city, she downloads it on a whim that she shouldn’t think through and decides it might be fun to have someone to travel with, even briefly. After she’s signed up, created a profile, and filled in her details, she is given two options to match with, and ends up going for the latter: Garcia from Dubrovnik. She thought about Marko from Zagreb, but his profile says that he’s a Dinamo Ultra, and she decided that she didn’t want to spend the day getting a crash course in the finer points of Croatian football hooliganism. Garcia it is, apparently.

Dubrovnik is insanely beautiful, with crystalline turquoise water lapping at towering medieval city walls (souvenir shops every few streets will proudly remind you that they filmed Game of Thrones here), palm trees, red-tiled roofs, old golden-stone buildings, winding side alleys, and sunlight that pours down as rich as olive oil. Since it’s November, it’s not quite as hot as in high summer, and the tourist rush is somewhat dimmed. Lucy sleeps late at her Airbnb high on a very steep side street, as the city is spread out over several hills on the side of the tall blue mountains that rise out of the water, and almost forgets that her fake wedding is today. She jumps out of bed, puts on some makeup (just because she’s not actually marrying the guy doesn’t mean she has to look completely trollish), grabs her bag, and heads down into town, following a winding alley of staircases that are probably going to be a pain to climb back up. She hopes this was a good idea. It was mostly to appease Amy, anyway. Can she cancel, or would that count as leaving Garcia at the (fake) altar?

What the hell, she’s here now, and maybe if she shows that she’s receptive to new experiences, the universe will give her a break. Lucy trots along the palm-treed square above the city walls, finds the door with the Untourist logo by the bell, and steps inside. “Dobro jutro,” she says, which is about all the Croatian she speaks, and most people have been happy to use English anyway. “I’m Lucy Preston, I have an appointment today?”

The slick Unreceptionist greets her, gives her a waiver to sign (bad experiences and/or unsatisfactory spouses are not their fault, any meeting beyond the day is done on personal terms, etc) and they await the arrival of her dashing groom-to-be. It is twelve minutes past their scheduled start time, and the Unreceptionist is making apologetic noises, when the door opens with a bit of a crash and a man who must be Garcia ducks in. He’s tall, dark, and craggy-handsome, probably in his forties, wearing aviator sunglasses, and clutching a takeaway coffee. He addresses the Unreceptionist in rapid Croatian, looks up, sees Lucy, and nods shortly. “Ah,” he says, switching to English. “Right, you’re here. Let’s go.”

“Sir,” the Unreceptionist says, looking as if he’s wondering if Garcia himself read the details and/or the release forms before signing up. “You’re supposed to…?”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to have the wedding ceremony first?”

“I’m supposed to have the what?”

At that, Lucy winces. Feeling as if this might be an opportune moment to interrupt the conversation, and wondering if it’s too late to switch to Marko from Zagreb and risk dying at an Eternal Derby game, she stands up. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Lucy Preston?”

“I know.” Garcia glances at her briefly, up and down, and then away. “What’s this about a wedding?”

“That’s the whole point of the app,” Lucy says pointedly. “Fake-married, take me to places that aren’t touristy, then at the end of the day, go our separate ways?”

Garcia looks briefly pole-axed, then seems to decide that right, well, this is on him for failing to read the terms and conditions. “Fine,” he says impatiently. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

Lucy’s cheeks sting. Making a mental note to give him a zero of five stars on any feedback form that she might have to fill in to rate her experience today, she follows him into the back, where they are joined in a very non-legally-binding ceremony, have their photo taken (Garcia looks like this is a real funeral rather than a fake wedding) and finally are released into the wild, as Garcia (who is a good foot taller than her) strides ahead without waiting. When Lucy runs to catch up, he says, “Nobody told me there was a wedding involved.”

“Did you even read what they wanted?” Lucy’s tone is slightly waspish, but then, he isn’t exactly showering her in that supposedly famous Slavic hospitality. The sweet lady at the Airbnb was much nicer than this. “It was right there in the entire premise. If you don’t want to spend a day taking me around the city, fine, but maybe next time, try to actually – ”

“No,” Garcia says abruptly. “You’re here now. Let’s go.”

With that, he strides off toward the gate in the towering walls, down into the Stari Grad. Lucy thinks the view from up there must be spectacular, but she’s not actually going to get a chance to find out, because Garcia derides them as too touristy and refuses to pay 200 kuna to go up them. (This is something like $30, so it clearly is a lot, but the city sees no reason not to profit off all the Game of Thrones fans.) Nor does he think much of the main drag, the cathedral square, the rector’s palace, or any of the other usual sights. He says that Lucy can call him Flynn, but doesn’t explain why. She thinks it’s his last name, but honestly, she can’t be sure. He has the social skills of a broken-down dump truck.

Finally, since there isn’t much of Dubrovnik, at least the old town, that isn’t touristy, Lucy persuades Flynn to let them go up the walls, though by the face he makes at the cashier as he pays for their tickets, the poor man might be found floating face-down in the ocean later. They climb up to the winding ramparts, gazing out over the Adriatic to one side and the crowded, tiled roofs on the other, and on one steep section, Lucy loses her footing and nearly falls. She wouldn’t have gone over the edge, there are plenty of barriers, but Flynn flashes out a hand and steadies her. It’s the first remotely human or non-dickish thing he’s done, and she raises an eyebrow. “Thanks.”

Perhaps sensing by her acerbic tone that he has not been the world’s most satisfactory fake husband to date, Flynn has the grace to blush, or at least look somewhat chagrined. “I’d definitely get in trouble if you died.”

“Thanks,” Lucy says again, even more tartly. “Guess it’s a good thing for you that you have good reflexes?”

“I fought in the Homeland War.” Flynn glances away. It’s the first personal thing he’s shared about himself, in a casual, offhand way that makes it sound no more remarkable than getting milk from the store. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”

Lucy glances at him. He’s made it clear that he’s not here for the fake marriage, let alone small talk, but she paid a decent amount of money to be here with this tall idiot and he can just suffer it. “Are you from Dubrovnik?”

“I was born in Šibenik.” Flynn doesn’t break stride, obliging Lucy to trot to keep up with him. “Lived a few places around the country. It was Yugoslavia back then, though. War started in 1991.”

“I know,” Lucy says. “I mean, I’m a historian, so I was recently doing some work on 1989 and the U.S. response to the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. Technically, Yugoslavia wasn’t Soviet, right?”

“No,” Flynn says, with a sort of grim pride. “Tito and Stalin hated each other. It was…. sort of an in-between place, I suppose. We didn’t need exit visas, there was a certain amount of social freedom, and Tito liked to market it as neutral, a third country between East and West, combining the best of both and the worst of neither. Of course, he was a dictator, but supposedly a benevolent one. Most people liked him. My childhood was – ” He stops. “Well, my mother was American, anyway. Maybe that was what drew her here. Running away.”

Lucy glances up at him. She has a sense that Flynn doesn’t often talk much about his past, and decides that since they are, after all, only fake-married, she doesn’t need to pry. However, since the subject of his mother has arisen, she holds back as best she can, not wanting to dump the fraught subject of Carol Preston on a strange man who has only just met her and treated her one step above gum stuck to his shoe, but finally needs to talk about it with someone who isn’t Amy. She still isn’t sure Flynn gives a damn, but too bad for him. She mentions that it’s been hard, with the Stanford legacy and the cancer and the expectations that she would accept Noah’s proposal, and she just – well, she doesn’t know. Maybe Lucy understands a bit of Flynn’s mother, whoever she was, whyever she came here. Maybe she too was, or is, running away. Even if she has to fly all the way back to San Francisco at the end of this week, some part of her would be more than happy to fling all her responsibilities to the wind, move into some picturesque old flat in one of those tiny streets, and stay.

They descend the walls after completing their circuit, and Flynn deigns to buy her lunch at a small cafe where the menu is only in Croatian and a sign informs customers that they don’t take euros, only kuna. Lucy allows him to order something for her, and they sit there eating in semi-awkward silence. Then Flynn says, apropos of nothing, “Maria.”

“What?”

“My mother’s name.” He shrugs. “It was Maria Tompkins. She was from Houston. She moved to Yugoslavia in 1970, after the death of her first husband and son. She was traveling through Europe, I don’t know that she intended to stay here, but she met my father, so she did.”

“Oh.” Lucy wonders what it would have been like here in the seventies. Probably still beautiful, though much less developed. So Maria Tompkins fell in love, that was what made a young American woman go Red, a move that must have been regarded dimly by her friends and family back in Texas. With that sort of tragedy shadowing her past, maybe it was easier to cut all ties, to get a new passport, to learn a new language, and never look back. Lucy feels a sudden pang of sympathy with this other woman, this unknown fellow traveler, who too found herself in this corner of the world wanting to leave it all behind. Lucy has responsibilities at home, not least her job (even if they didn’t give her tenure, or at least it’s very much in academic bureaucracy limbo), her sister, her sick mother, all the encumbrances and trappings of real life. She can’t do what Maria did, no matter how much she wants to. And for some reason completely unknown to her – it certainly isn’t the pleasure of Flynn’s company – she does.

They finish lunch and head out. It’s warm enough for November that Flynn suggests they can go for a dip, though he gives her a no-clearly-not look when Lucy naively thinks this will be at Banje Beach, the main spot just south of the walls. He leads her up to the street, where they find his car and get in. It’s an Audi, and she wonders what exactly he does for a living. He has a habit of scanning their surroudings, casually flicking his gaze at passersby, in a way that she doesn’t think stems from his military service alone. In fact, she’s starting to wonder if he joined the Untourist app to case the city and/or scope out people without it being too suspicious. Maybe it’s better for everyone if she doesn’t ask about his job. He might have to suffocate her and bundle her up in a black plastic garbage bag in the boot.

Flynn, it transpires, drives like a bit of a maniac, a habit he shares with most of the other road users (especially the scooters and motorcycles). Lucy has already noticed that Croatians seem to have a rather laissez-faire attitude toward personal safety, as evidenced by their tendency to stand outside guardrails overlooking steep drops, walk the wrong way along busy highways, dart across roads in front of oncoming traffic, and jury-rig anything that isn’t actively falling apart. When she mentions this to Flynn, he shrugs. “Slavs are like that,” he says matter-of-factly. “Especially Croatians. Though if you think we’re bad, you should meet the Poles.”

Lucy laughs despite herself, since that’s the first time Flynn has loosened up to flash any bit of actual humor. Well, that’s not quite true; he is remarkably sassy, has a sarcastic comment for most occasions and especially anything involving a tourist making a fool of themselves, but this is the first time that his humor has seemed gentler, more like he’s actually enjoying himself and poking a bit of self-deprecating fun rather than lashing out at the world. They drive along the cliff road for several miles in silence, until Lucy asks, “When did you move to Dubrovnik?”

“About…” Flynn hesitates, and she senses that there’s more riding on the answer to that question than he wants to let on. “Well, I lived in Zagreb until 2014.”

“And you moved here after that?”

“More or less.” Flynn adjusts the rearview mirror, which doesn’t really need it. After a long pause he says, “My wife and daughter died in 2014. I came here for – well, I didn’t want to stay there anymore.”

“I’m….” Lucy feels taken aback, almost guilty that she’s been so derisive of his inability to read app terms and conditions, his clear aversion to the whole fake-married part. Not that they’ve really been acting like it, anyway, but still. She can imagine it wouldn’t be easy for her, if that ever happened, to stand up and play-act some stupid charade for an American tourist hiring you like a beast of burden, not when you’d had the real thing, not when it was gone. “Garcia,” she says, the first time she’s used that since he told her to call him Flynn. She has a sense that he prefers that, that Garcia is some place too personal where he doesn’t let people go, not any longer. “I’m sorry.”

He glances at her, and for a moment she thinks he’ll snap at her, but he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes on the road, navigating the tight turns with ease, until at last he says, “I’m sorry I haven’t been very much fun.”

Lucy opens her mouth by polite reflex to say that he has, and settles for a noncommital hum. Flynn seems to sense that while he might have worked his way up from zero stars, he’s still a way off from five, and parks the Audi in a pullout. They descend a narrow cliff path to the sea, he reaches out to catch her arm when her feet skid again on the pebbles, and Lucy decides she should probably warn him that she’s clumsy before she really does accidentally kill herself. But if she fell into the sea from here, she has an unaccountable sense that he’d dive in after her, no matter how odd and brusque and grumpy he is. It’s less clear whether this is because he’s starting to like her a little, or because it would be an insult to his professional competence. Maybe he’s in the Mafia.

They reach a small quay where a catamaran is tied up, Flynn strides to it and produces two life jackets, and once Lucy has climbed aboard, he swings on, undoes the ropes, and angles the sails out into the wide blue water, endless as a reflected sky. It must be a busy harbor in summer, and there’s still a decent boat traffic now: ferries, jet-skis, a few sailboats and pleasure yachts. Lucy holds on tight as Flynn carves an expert white wake. “Is this your boat, then?”

“No,” Flynn says. “But I borrow it from time to time.”

“Did you – ” Lucy gives him a very narrow stare. “Did you steal this boat?”

“No!” Flynn looks miffed that she would ask. “I know the owner, he lets me use it when I want to. What kind of man do you think I am?”

Lucy opens her mouth, starts to answer, and stops. Truth is, she isn’t sure. An hour ago she would have said a raging, self-absorbed dick with no social skills and possibly black-market employment, and parts of that are still true, but the rest, well… she can’t say exactly. He keeps letting slip these odd, vulnerable parts of him, almost in spite of himself. His past in the war, his mother running away from her old life, his dead wife and daughter, everything else. She isn’t certain what she thinks of him, exactly, but she isn’t wishing that she picked Marko from Zagreb anymore. If nothing else, Flynn is complicated, and challenging, and oddly easy to talk to, and he hasn’t told her to shut up about the family/work/life drama that she occasionally returns to venting about. Lucy thinks she’ll take that, at least.

She looks at his hands, large and sun-brown and expertly pulling and tying the knots to trim the sail, as he pulls them to a bobbing halt in the sparkling water and asks if she wants to swim. Lucy didn’t put on her bathing suit under her clothes, but she doesn’t want to go to the bother of making him drive all the way back to the Airbnb. So she strips off her shirt and jeans, and, in just her bra and underpants (hey, they’re married, even fakely), she dives in.

The water is chillier than she expected – this is the southern Mediterranean, it’s never cold no matter the season, but it is November, and she splutters and gasps as she bobs to the surface. Flynn, observing from the high-and-dry comfort of the catamaran, smirks at her, and Lucy gives him the finger. “You dick,” she shouts. “You could have warned me.”

Flynn shrugs, apparently utterly untroubled either by this accusation or by her attitude; indeed, he grins as if he appreciates this feistiness, her willingness to talk back at him and tell it like it is. Lucy spends so much time biting her tongue around absolutely everyone else that this reaction is both unexpected and deeply liberating, and once she’s swum around the catamaran a few times and adjusted to the water temperature, she takes a deep breath and dives down under the pontoons. Then she surfaces on the far side, reaches up, and just as Flynn senses danger and whips around, she grabs him by the back of the shirt and jerks him backward.

He’s wearing a life jacket, of course, so he doesn’t go too far under, but the expression on his face is worth every penny that she paid to the stupid app. He shakes his wet hair like a dog as he surfaces, and she has to say, he looks really good while doing it. “Excuse me,” he says, in a tone of deep umbrage. “Who told you that it was a good idea to start a marriage off by throwing your husband in the drink?”

“Maybe if I’m drowning you for the life insurance,” Lucy shoots back, before she can stop herself. She has no idea who this woman is, who has gone from being exasperated and shut off with Flynn to – well, she did in fact just throw him in the ocean, but there’s definitely something different about their dynamic now. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call it flirty, whether or not this is listed in Untourist’s terms and conditions (and as well established, Flynn did not read them anyway). “After all, I think we can say that you deserve it. Tragic boating accident?”

Too late, she wonders if this is a bad idea to joke about, since she doesn’t actually know how his wife and daughter died (she hopes it wasn’t that, anyway) but Flynn actually laughs, and it transforms his whole face. They spend a very enjoyable forty minutes swimming around, splashing each other, and hanging onto the side of the catamaran and letting their legs sway in the current. They’re close alongside each other as they do, Lucy is conscious of only being in her wet underwear (it’s not like he can see anything while she’s submerged, but still), and something passes between them as their eyes meet. His throat moves as he swallows, and after a moment too long, he looks away.

They climb back on the boat, Flynn looses the sail and steers them back toward land, and they disembark, Lucy once more watching for investigative purposes as he ties up. They dry off and she pulls on her damp clothes, as Flynn decorously turns his back and waits until she is done. Then they tramp up the bluff to the car (Lucy was thinking about retiring here, since it’s warm and sunny and beautiful and all that, but if she is elderly, all the climbing might be too much) and drive back toward the town center. The sun is getting low, her paid-for day is almost done, and despite the total disaster that was it starting out, Lucy is oddly reluctant for it to do so. As Flynn pulls up in front of the Untourist office, she says convulsively, “Maybe we should… I don’t know. I think they’re closed, anyway. You don’t have to drop me off here.”

Flynn glances at her, then considers it. He could offer to just take her back to her Airbnb (those streets really were not designed for sane drivers, and Lucy can see why tiny Smart cars are popular around here, but Flynn would absolutely not fit into one) and he still might. Then he says, “Well, technically, the day isn’t over. Do you suppose I could take you out for dinner?”

“You….” Lucy coughs. “I suppose you could.”

They find parking, and walk down into the old town, as the moon is rising over the walls, the towers are floodlit, the city gleams in the cooling dusk like its nickname, the “Pearl of the Adriatic,” and they find another cafe where the clientele is mostly local. They linger late over dinner, and Flynn says that he will in fact drive her back when they’re finally done, and as she’s about to undo her seatbelt and get out, Lucy hesitates. Then she screws up her courage, leans over, and kisses him very fast on the cheek. “Thank you,” she says. “I had – I really did have a great time.”

Flynn looks as surprised as her to hear it, but somehow and shyly gratifeid as well. A fugitive smile plays at the corner of his mouth, tentative, tender. For a moment, she thinks he might be about to kiss her back for real, but he clears his throat and holds out his hand instead. “Er,” he says. “Thank you, Dr. Preston.”

Lucy hesitates, fighting her disappointment, and shakes it back. Then she steps out of the car and unlocks the door of the apartment, as he waits to see that she gets inside without random Ragusan fiends materializing from the shrubbery. Even when she does step in, the car idles a few more moments, and she glances back, wondering – or perhaps it’s only hoping – that he’s chastising himself for letting her walk away. Then the car starts again, she can see his dark figure sitting too stiff and straight at the wheel, and she watches until the taillights vanish around a steep turn, and fade into the night.

#lucy x flynn #garcy #garcy ff #croatia 2k19 #extasiswings #ask

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lord-rosenth0rne · 5 years

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I love how I make characters to be my persona in certain universes and I end up putting too much thought in them to where I make a background and alter them so much that when I do something that I would normally do, it becomes too OOC for that character and I have to go back to the drawing board XD

My Pyro Main just became that...She went from destructive, fun-loving, hopeless romantic to this silent Michael Myers type who killed her mother for forcing her into beauty pageants with a penchant for throwing gasoline around and lighting people on fire just for the hell of it.

Yeah... This oughta be fun. Might still be able to shoehorn the hopeless romantic bit in there somewhere for her but the rest went out the window.

Edit: I kiiiinda also made my own team... On paper and SFM too... I think I kinda went overboard... I can post the SFM stuff later if anyone’s interested. The rest is undercut. Some just have a couple of things off from their original counterparts.

Jethro: An elderly cantankerous engineer. Years in the mercenary field has taken a toll on him and made him salty. Due to this, his teammates try to avoid him on the field and off. He won’t hesitate to call you out on bullshit or make an example of you if you try to push him. He absolutely hates incompetence and believes his ‘team’ is full of idiots who ‘can’t tell their asses from holes in the ground’. He can usually hold his own very well which has led the opposing team to gang up on him in order to take him down. This has become an issue but due to his reputation with the other teammates, he can’t get the help he needs. He is the oldest by far out of all of the mercenaries. His favorite word is ‘Dumbass’ but his insults can get quite colorful and creative. His past isn’t well known other than the fact he was once married and had kids.

Stefan: The team’s Medic and leader. As a young man studying in the medical field, he was forced to join the Nazi cause but fled the moment he could, however not before performing unspeakable acts under the threat of those same acts happening to him. He is haunted by what he has done and has tried to turn himself in once the allies had taken over only to be brushed off due to lack of evidence. The commander who forced him to do those acts had taken credit for all of it for some twisted sense of ‘glory’. Stefan suffers from a heavy form of PTSD and can’t be left alone to his thoughts without alcohol. He considers himself a monster who can’t go back to normal life. He has been under Jethro’s wing since he entered the Mercenary scene. He tries to atone for his past by being a good leader and Medic to his team.

Jasper: The team’s Sniper. He’s very calm, quiet and reserved. He doesn’t often get involved in any conflict with other teammates unless it is to break up a nasty fight. If he has to raise his voice, someone is going to pay. He prefers the solitude his job gives him. He has several birds which he uses to communicate with others without leaving the watchtower of the base headquarters. He’s rarely seen outside of the base when not fighting. His teammates chalk it up to his job needing stealth more than him actually wanting to be alone.

Nikoli: The team’s Heavy. That’s all anyone knows minus his favorite foods and past times. While he is friendly and can be quite boisterous, the man is careful not to reveal anything about his past. He will become stone-faced if asked about it and will promptly change the subject. He is well versed in multiple weapons and can be an efficient leader when given the opportunity. Rumor has it that he may have been or still be a sleeper agent but no evidence has surfaced. The Soldier tries to butt heads with Nikoli over the fact he’s Russian but Nikoli laughs him off and offers to buy him a drink.

Gawen: The team’s Demoman and second in command. Gawen came to America looking for a better life only to fall deep into the crime scene when he was met with resistance and racism from the locals. The only jobs he could land were those no one wanted to do but even then they didn’t pay well. He was soon picked up by a local crime syndicate after he finished a fight that he didn’t start in a local pub against rival gang members. As a member, he thrived for years while discovering his love for explosives but once the head of the syndicate was assassinated, it was disbanded and caused him to go west to find work.

Jack: The team’s Scout. Fancies himself as ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. Some kid from the Bronx who thinks he’s hot shit with a passion for sports, not just baseball. After beating a customer to near death with a metal bat at the sports store he used to work at, he fled and ended up at Teufort. He insists the customer was asking for it and doesn’t seem to regret his actions. Jack also seems to be a closeted homosexual and shows extreme fear when someone jokingly alludes to him being gay which often leads to him trying to ‘prove heterosexuality’ to the person. One of his cousins was tortured and murdered for being homosexual by people who were supposed to be friends.

Iggy: The team’s offensive Pyro, but he usually goes by ‘Pyro’. Not many of the Mercs actually know it’s ‘Iggy’. He looks like an absolute badass biker but it’s all for show. The other team doesn’t need to know that though. He does not take off his mask for anyone except the Medic. He does own a motorcycle and will go off on his own for long periods of time. When he’s at the base, he usually knits, cooks, and cleans. He does not like Jethro as the codger made him cry on more than one occasion.

Arsene: The team’s Spy. Because no one is using their original names, this man has decided to choose the name of the famous gentleman thief, Arsene Lupin, who may or may not exist in their fictional universe. Not much is known about the man otherwise, other than the fact he may be on several watch lists under several different names. He loves gardening and incorporates fresh flowers in his dapper style whenever possible. He tends to flirt with anything that moves.

Warren: The team’s Soldier. Second oldest on the team and an actual war veteran… er, war criminal. He abandoned his platoon in order to carry out some extreme measures on the enemy. He was hoping to get to Hitler himself and strangle him. Once he got word of Hitler’s suicide, he set his sights on Stalin but was caught before he could even reach Russia. His kill streak spans into the hundreds. He and Stefan have crossed paths once before with Stefan narrowly escaping his rampage.

Cynder: The team’s defensive Pyro and the only female to date on the team (Soldier bitches about it behind her back). She was hired onto the Red team at Stefan’s request to help Jethro as none of the other teammates wanted to and basically does intern work outside of battle. While she has no recorded work experience, she does have training as she comes from a long lineage of mercenaries. She is often silent and has a Michael Myers vibe about her when she is working, using only gestures to communicate. She has a habit of just appearing out of nowhere. She uses this to her advantage, often splashing targets with gasoline and lighting them on fire if the situation calls for it. It’s a game of Russian Roulette, leaving witnesses to wonder if she’ll light the gas or not. She often carries an old silver zippo lighter with a skull etched in the side. The shotgun she uses is an old stock shotgun with ornate markings down its barrel that belonged to a family member of hers. Her teammates do not know what to make of her and the presence of a woman on the team has caused opposing team to hesitate when squaring off with her. She doesn’t have Pyrovision but is brutal enough without it. Cynder is considered the catalyst for more female mercs to be hired by the two companies.

#Her name is Cynder #so I might have to keep Rosenthorne for actual personas #This wasn't supposed to happen #The song 'Gasoline' by Halsey just became her anthem #SFM #TF2 #Characters I accidentally made

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adamwatchesmovies · 6 years

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The Best of 2018 (So Far)

By this time in 2017, I’d seen the year’s best film - Get Out. That’s not the case with 2018, and I’m not sure how many, if any, of the films on this list will remain once we’ve seen the next six months’ worth of movies. It’s a bit of a letdown, but also an opportunity to give one more push to some great pieces of entertainment. If you haven’t seen any of the following yet, make a point to seek them out.

10. Love, Simon

The most romantic film of the year (so far) is between a gay teen… and his closeted penpal. Sweet and crowd-pleasing, it’s the kind of picture we would never have seen even 5 years ago. It uses modern tech such as cellphones and chat room bullying to great effect, but doesn't overindulge on them, making it a picture that will endure. I foresee many young adults telling us 10 years from now that Love, Simon had a big impact on them.

9. The Death of Stalin

This is one crazy movie. Even with the absurd behaviour displayed by Stalin and his power-hungry cabinet members, you know that much has been downplayed to make what happens in The Death of Stalin more palpable. It’s so dark it becomes funny again, a real-life political nightmare whose details you can’t believe you haven't heard of until the film presents them to you.

8. Annihilation

A tad slow at times, Annihilation nonetheless makes the list of the year’s best (so far) because of some key novel aspects. This is a horror survival story in which the threats are beautiful. Following a team of women investigating an extraterrestrial crash, they stumble upon colours and shapes you’ve never seen before. During its conclusion, it becomes the kind of disturbing story that is so out there you have trouble comparing it to anything else.

7. Blockers

It’s been a good year for comedies and I almost found a place for Game Night on this list. Unfortuantely, it got edged out at the last minute. As for Blockers, it’s a far smarter and funnier film than the trailers suggested. It puts a clever, modern spin on the teen sex comedy and balances out its crude jokes with plenty of heart.

6. Isle of Dogs

Probably the best-looking film we’ve gotten all year (there’s some stiff competition, particularly from #4 and #8), I fully expect Isle of Dogs to be nominated for best animated picture. This picture by Wes Anderson isn’t just one thing. It’s the story of a boy and his dog, it’s a love letter to classic Japanese films (and I don’t mean anime). There are elements of tragedy, of comedy, of adventure. It's funny and touching in unexpected ways. It makes bold choices in its narrative and writing, particularly in the language(s) the characters speak.

5. Hereditary

I’ve seen Hereditary twice and recognize that it isn’t for everyone. There are people who have a certain idea of what a horror movie is and when they don’t see exactly what they expected, they don’t know what to do. This film has no jump scares, little gore and few moments I’d qualify as “fun” but it is genuinely frightening and disturbing. We don’t get many horror films like this one and when we do, they need to be celebrated.

4. Black Panther

I don’t expect to see a better superhero film this year than Black Panther, (though I do have high hopes for Aquaman and X-Men’s Dark Phoenix). Yes there’s the primarily black cast to rave about, but all that talk about the cast makes it sound like the film is a cultural obligation. What about that scene where T’Challa and Erik are fighting with melee weapons, or the art direction? Let's talk about the performances and that soundtrack! There are so many things to love about this film, including the fact that it’s confident enough not to cram in cameos by other denizens of the Marvel Universe or wink at what chapter will come next… until that scene after the credits which is only kinda part of the movie anyway. I’ve been told that the special effects have been cleaned up for the home release, which is just another reason to revisit it one more time.

3. Thoroughbreds

A lot of dark comedies on this list. A lot of comedies in general actually, which probably says something about the way directors and writers are feeling about the world around them. The advertisements for Thoroughbreds have been calling it a cross between Heathers and American Psycho and it’s a great comparison. There are twinges of a real friendship you can latch onto between the moments where the two leads plan a murder. It’s got one of the year’s best endings, a delightfully unsettling and unpredictable turn that punches you in the chest and leaves an imprint.

2. Upgrade

Making these lists is difficult, and it gets even more difficult when, because of a delay in my schedule, I wind up seeing a movie that absolutely must find a place on the list. Upgrade is darkly funny gory action fun that takes some smart turns towards the conclusion. Some of the other films on this list might not make it all the way to the end of the year and onto the final “Best of 2018” list but I’m pretty sure this one will. I’ll have the review posted in the next few days.

1. A Fantastic Woman

It’s a bit of a cheat, I know. A Fantastic Woman would’ve probably made my list of “The Best of 2017” had I seen it in time, but instead I saw it when it came to my city, in March. Now’s the right time to give it the praise it deserves, if the Oscar it received for Best Foreign Language Film wasn't enough.

#the best of 2018 #movies #films #reviews #2018 movies #get out #love simon #the death of stalin #annihilation #blockers #game night #isle of dogs #hereditary #black panther #thoroughbreds #upgrade #a fantastic woman #heathers #american psycho

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agentnico · 6 years

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The Disaster Artist (2017) Review

Oh hi, Tumblr!

Plot: When Greg Sestero, an aspiring film actor, meets the weird and mysterious Tommy Wiseau in an acting class, they form a unique friendship and travel to Hollywood to make their dreams come true.

So there is this film that exists which goes by the name ‘The Room’. No, I’m not talking about ‘Room’, the Oscar nominated Brie Larson starring movie, but the 2003 movie that was written, produced and directed by this vampire-like guy named Tommy Wiseau. Oh, and yes, he also stars in that movie! To summarise that film in a nutshell, its known as one of the worst movies ever made, however its not like any other bad movie. With a bad movie, you watch it, have a terrible time and then never watch or think about it ever again. With ‘The Room’, it’s a special kind of deal. Its bad, don’t get me wrong, there are so many wrong things about it, yet I have rewatched that movie so many times, and had a great time doing so every single time. It’s just strangely entertaining. ‘The Room’ is the definition of a movie that is so bad that it is actually good. Hilarious dialogue, so many weird directorial choices, endless pictures of spoons (for some reason!), characters so bad that they become so memorable and some of the most quotable lines in cinema history. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” So if you haven’t seen ‘The Room’, watch it. Get some friends together and watch it, and you’ll have one hell of a night! Also watch it for the sake of ‘The Disaster Artist’, as even though ‘The Disaster Artist’ stands well on its own, watching it is a lot more enjoyable if you have experienced ‘The Room’ beforehand, trust me on that one. Anyways, let’s actually talk about ‘The Disaster Artist’, or else I’m going to end up going on an endless tangent of discussion about ‘The Room’!

So ‘The Disaster Artist’ is a behind-the-scenes look on the making of ‘The Room’, more specifically about these two friends, Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, who move to Los Angeles to pursue their dreams of becoming actors, and when after a lot of effort fortune doesn’t go their way, they decide to make their own little movie, ‘The Room’, however the results of that film were nothing that they could have possibly imagined. And being that ‘The Disaster Artist’ is brought to us from the likes of James Franco and Seth Rogen, who are known for making stoner comedies, it was obvious that this film was going to be a comedy at least partially, and boy is it funny! This film is easily one of my favourite comedies this year alongside ‘The Death of Stalin’, as the laughs are endless, and it is was really rare for their to be a joke pop up that wasn’t in some way entertaining. The way ‘The Disaster Artist’ infused comedy was through the was Tommy Wiseau acts around others, how he is different from everyone else, however at the same time the film celebrates the individuality and uniqueness of every person, including Wiseau, and how that in the end can work for their benefit. And also the film has a lot of fun re-imagining the iconic scenes from ‘The Room’ with all these new actors, which again is a cause for much laughter. However even though I really appreciated the comedic moments, it was the deeper emotional moments that I connected with more. This film is mainly about two things: friendship and fighting for your dreams. The friendship between Wiseau and Sestero is very interesting to unravel, whilst the whole idea of achieving and not giving up on your dreams is a lesson that anyone can learn, as if you never give up, you will get somewhere, maybe not the way you wanted it to, but like with Wiseau, Sestero and ‘The Room’, in an unexpected way that still works out very well. And when the film focuses on these moments, this is where it truly shines, and that is why I also have a slight complaint, as I feel like the film should have delved a bit more deeper into the emotional side of things. The emotion is there, but I feel like there definitely was space for more. That is one of my two slight issues with this film, however I’d like to emphasise that both this and the point I will discuss later didn’t detract much from my enjoyment of this film. I still very much loved it, but I also felt like I’d very much need to address these minor issues.

The cast assembled for this film is literally superb. Both James Franco and Dave Franco fit perfectly into the roles of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, and since these two actors are brothers in real life, their on-screen friendship felt even more real. Also, Franco nails the Wiseau accent, whilst at the same time adding his own little spin on it. All the people playing the cast members of ‘The Room’ are some of the best casting of the year. Ari Graynor was very accurate as ‘Lisa’, Jacki Weaver as ‘Claudette’ was very funny, constantly asking if the infamous “I have breast cancer!” line will have any follow up later in the story, Josh Hutcherson is hysterical as the creepy ‘Denny’, and Zac Efron is unrecognisable as the drug dealer ‘Chris-R’. Then the behind-the-scenes of ‘The Room’ crew all did great, however special mentions to Seth Rogen and Paul Scheer as the script supervisor and director of photography, both of which have a superbly done confrontational scene with Franco’s Wiseau. And Jason Mantzoukas has a great little cameo in the film too. Now we come to my second negative for the film, with Alison Brie as the weak-link of the cast, well more her character rather than her, since Brie does good with what she is given, however her character felt very lackluster and wasn’t given much to do, whilst I think with her being Sestero’s girlfriend, there was room (get it?) for more confrontation with Wiseau, since the movie hints at this, but never goes all the way, which I think was a missed opportunity.

As a whole, ‘The Disaster Artist’ is a very well done film, with some surprisingly great cinematography work (probably the biggest surprise of the whole film for me), a great script from screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber that adapted Sestero’s book, solid comedy with lots of one-liners (though none as memorable as those from ‘The Room’ itself!), and the emotional parts are done well, though as I said earlier, there was room for more.

Overall score: 8/10

TOP MOVIE QUOTE: “Oh hi, Mark...Oh hi, Mark...Oh hi, Mark......Oh hi, Greg!”

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red-mafia-rpg-blog · 7 years

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Violet Laurent || The Undercover || The Trickster

TAKEN | OPEN |

Face-claim: Antonia Thomas Age: 30 Occupation: Con Artist Nationality/Ethnicity: French // Half Caribbean, Half White

PERSONALITY

+ Wise, Adaptable, Ambitious

- Mischievous, Cunning, Deceptive

There is a reason why Violet earned the title “The Trickster”. Barely anyone knows what she is really like. Though she comes across as friendly when around others, Violet tends to keep to herself. Who could she trust more than herself? It’s hard to move from place to place being tied down to others. So she refuses to get too close to people. She knows how to play the game and knows what it means to keep her head above water. Even though causing a little (or a lot) of mischief is always fun, she’s not one to simply give up on anything that she does or stray away from the job at hand. By all means, she will achieve her end goals with failure not being an option. It’s not easy to keep track of what this little lady’s next move may be. Though she can easily make her presence known, she can just as easily disappear without a trace.

BIOGRAPHY

How did a French girl end up in Russia? It’s something many think when they first see Violet and hear her talk. With her short frame, round face, and sweet disposition, no one would ever know that she was one of the biggest Con Artist living in Moscow. Known to be a Jack of all trades to those who worked with her, not many knew what to expect with this woman. Who exactly was Violet Laurent? Born and raised in Nice, France, Jean Collette lived in a small cottage with her grandparents. Her father was a sailor who traveled to the French colonies in the Caribbean often. He had climb through the ranks over his years in the Navy and became a very respectable man. he had become injured on day over seas and once they docked in the Caribbean, his crew sought medical attention for him. At the hospital, he met a young nurse whom he fell in love with. He had promised to take her back to France with her once he found out she was pregnant with his child. Yet due to complications during her pregnancy, she died giving birth to his beautiful daughter. When he went back to his hometown holding a baby in his arms, his parents didn’t know what to do. A Black child out of wedlock? What were they suppose to do next?

Instead of denouncing their Grandchild, the Collettes raised her like they raised their only son. While their son went off to explore the world, they taught her to read, write, and speak over seven languages. She was a smart young girl who only wanted to do her best for her grandparents. Grandfather, who had little money, was able to borrow coding and mechanics books so that Jean could read them since she always helped him in his clock workshop. When Jean was 13, her grandfather died peacefully in his sleep. He had been a watch maker all of his life and that was how the family received their income. Her Grandmother told her there was nothing to worry about when it came to money. Jean’s father still sent some money to them but it was barely enough in Jean’s mind. Without any hesitation, Jean left Nice in the middle of the night and ran away to Paris. With only a note left to her dear grandmother explaining her whereabouts, she knew this was the only way to help her small family out.

Paris was on a different wavelength than Nice. It was fast paced and noisy but it didn’t scare Jean. It wasn’t easy living on the streets of Paris but she managed to move herself around easily. With her ability to speak different languages and her knowledge of different countries, she was able to create a persona for herself to move her way around Paris and earn money. Sure pickpocketing was easy to do but she wanted more than what was in their pocket. Living on the street, she learned quickly different skills she could use in order to successfully commit her first big con. Within two years she was able to send money to her Grandmother weekly. It hadn’t been easy, but she managed to trick the right people into believing she was a wealthy daughter of a judge in the Caribbeans. Gaining this image she was given access to information that others might not have been able to.

Though Jean was known in some social circles in Paris, she was able to still stay in the shadows and wait for the perfect moment to strike. To her, she was the only person she could trust. Especially when the war came around to Paris in 1940. While people started to flee Paris, she found something way more useful in staying. The nazi solders who came to occupy the city didn’t know what hit them when it came to her. She knew how to move herself around the city and take the information needed to sell information to the British and French force. For a small price of course. Jean refused to call it “greed”. That was such a harsh word to use. Call it a learning opportunity that simply presented itself to her. She was nothing but a whisper in the wind; she was a mere rumor. Before they could even realize what they had agreed to when it came to her services, she was gone without a trace.

Jean moved back to Nice just before the war ended only to find her grandmother was dying. She had lived a long life, she told Jean and wanted her granddaughter to do the same without any regrets. Before her last breath, her grandmother told her that her father sent a letter about three months ago saying her had a new life in Russia long before the war even started saying that he met a beautiful young woman during his travels and decided to move to Moscow since she was pregnant with his child. After her grandmother’s passing, Jean left Nice behind and navigated her way around Europe, debating if she should seek out her father. Changing her name to Violet Laurent, Jean left her old life in France and started a new one. Violet was cunning, mischievous, and wise beyond her years. And she was able to confidently commit any white collar crime with ease so that she could live the life she wanted.

In 1952, Violet found her way to Moscow. She had avoided this city mostly due to its politics but she also knew this was where her father was. Curiosity got the best of her. She wondered where he might have been or if he would even remember her if he saw her. Violet was happy to be by herself. It was easier to move around and get jobs done. But there was still something missing in her life. A void she could not ignore that always led her mind back to her ever absent father. The Tunnels seemed to be a good place for her to stay due to Stalin’s rule over this city before his fall in 1953. Violet did like she always did: watch her targets and wait for the right time to make her move. And when she did, rumors went around quick about the Little Trickster of Moscow. It wasn’t long into her stay that different groups wanted to recruit her. Violet wasn’t too surprise after all. She was good at what she did and she was proud of it.

Of course the Undercover didn’t know what to think when this pretty face came and asked for a position in their ranks. They had suspicions of who she was but wanted to test and see if she was actually as good as the stories said. This small young girl with a French accent was a joke to them but they gave her a chance. She had two weeks to prove them wrong. Given a task at the beginning of the week, she completed it within four days. Over time, she kept proving her worth within the group and quickly used the ranks to become the Undercover’s most trusted member as a commander of support. She was good at what she did and proved herself to be worthy of a title. Because of there mischievous nature, she gained the title of “Trickster” by her group.

Though she was good at her job and at times liked it, she never lost sight of the main reason she was in Moscow. Though friendly, she kept to herself mostly. Being too close to any one person could cause her trouble for her at the end of the day. She had a mind of her own after all and had no real enemies in the city like some in her group. Though she followed orders and did all of her jobs with ease, she wasn’t here for the long run. She wasn’t fully committed to the Undercover in the first place. They were just her means to find out where her father was. Violet preferred her old life to this one. And though she hated the secret police since arriving in Moscow, she found herself in an unlikely situation. A man she befriend ended up not only being the secret police, but her possible half brother. She had found what she wanted finally yet how did she know for certain this man was who he said he was? Yes she was offered a home, a life, and a family she had been looking for but was it worth it? Violet had betrayed people before with no problem. If she wanted everything this man offered, betraying the Undercover shouldn’t give her second thoughts right?

#new rp #new rpg #crime rpg #war rpg #biotaken #bio #bioundercover #mafia rp #crime rp #rebellion rpg #revolution rpg #lsrpg

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mergersacquisitionsadvisory · 4 years

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Elt Travel Of Oregon Coast Shopping

A properly-packed and properly deliberate tour with varied sites to go to and explore. Natia was affected person, educated and a very fun tour information. From the traditional cave city to the Stalin museum in Gori to the Jvari Monastery and, lastly, to the traditional Georgian capital of Mtskheta, there was a well spaced litany of experiences and sights. check this out

English is widely spoken among kids but solely in the city. Whatever language you utilize should you smile Georgians will smile too. Click right here to learn a whole information with tips for whenever you travel to Tbilisi.

<h2>Visit The Gonio Fortress</h2>

The visits to wineries and to the bread making village have been fairly informative, but for me, the highlight of the day was having lunch at the restaurant above the winery, not simply because of the good food, however as a result of it gave us all an opportunity to speak about Georgian tradition, food and history. We also visited the monastery of St. Nino (I thought it was notably fascinating to observe parishioners interact with St. Nino's grave) and the city of Sighnaghi . Lunch and the price of wine tasting on the second winery was an additional cost. Entry into the wine cave and wine tasting at the first winery have been included within the tour price. i feel the chemistry of this tour group was glorious and credit score is because of George for helping deliver out one of the best of our group.

Both founders did not reply to Skift’s request for an interview. The journey to green zones is permitted, anyway from Saturday, all individuals returning to Belgium from abroad or those who want to keep more than forty eight hours in the nation should complete an identification form, providing detailed info. Authorities in Belgium have banned non-important travel to some areas of France, Spain and Switzerland after these nations had been added to Belgium’s “purple zone” as a result of a surge in the number of new Coronavirus circumstances (COVID-19). Information on how to have a safe and pleasant journey whether you are travelling in Canada or abroad. This was my second tour with Guga Evgenidze and Mikheil Meladze of Gamarjoba Georgia Tours in Mikheil's Toyota Prius, or what Guga called our "time machine".

<h3>A Russian Way To Stay Healthy</h3>

“Turkey has been a role model for the world during COVID-19 with its well-established health system and remedy methods. We have additionally pioneered setting the direction for secure tourism with a certification program for normalization of tourism and we are actually glad to see WTTC bringing the efforts to a global degree." Part of our protocols embody offering the public & private sectors with the insights & toolkits for interplay & implementation to ensure that persons are and really feel safe nonetheless WTTC, our members and the sector can not guarantee 100% safety. Ultimately, we envision a future of travel which is secure, safe, seamless and provides an authentic and meaningful expertise to the traveller throughout the journey; one which supports the livelihoods of millions and contributes to sustainable economic growth.

<h2>Search Travel Gc.Ca</h2>

Safety issues merely never crossed my mind and that could be a good sign. I walked through the city in the midst of the night time, roaming the deserted streets with too much alcohol in my blood and I was not bothered taking a taxi as I felt fully safe. Even traveling to the outskirts of the town or local markets I felt completely safe.

<h3>Travel News, Travel Guides And Reviews</h3>

Last month, Belgium turned down the EU Council’s recommendation to reopen borders for the residents of 15 third-nations the place the epidemiological is considered secure. Belgium’s authorities announced that travel just isn't permitted to Mayenne department, France; Autonomous Region of Aragon; autonomous area of Navarre; Barcelona province and Lleida province , Spain.

<ul><li>Authorities emphasize the significance of taking precautions to ensure travel security.</li><li>“It is an honour to have our State included within the record of locations using the Safe Travels stamp; we're vastly supportive of the worldwide protocols as the well being and safety of our travellers is our precedence.</li><li>Some safety considerations include being conscious of one's surroundings, avoiding being the goal of a criminal offense, leaving copies of 1's passport and itinerary information with trusted people, obtaining medical insurance coverage legitimate within the country being visited and registering with one's nationwide embassy when arriving in a foreign country.</li><li>When traveling overseas, the odds favor a protected and incident-free trip, however, vacationers could be subject to difficulties, crime and violence.</li><li>The tourism destinations inside our state are able to receive travellers with open arms and to contribute to the reactivation of the sector in the nation."</li></ul>

<h2>Things To Do In Batumi</h2>

“It is an honour to have our State included within the listing of locations utilizing the Safe Travels stamp; we're hugely supportive of the worldwide protocols because the well being and safety of our travellers is our precedence. The tourism locations inside our state are ready to receive travellers with open arms and to contribute to the reactivation of the sector within the nation." Authorities emphasize the importance of taking precautions to make sure journey security.

Batumi Water Park is designed for a thousand people and it is the best place for summer season holidaymakers of any age. Then our columnist intervened with the Boston-based mostly tour operator Overseas Adventure Travel. Unclear policies, complicated customer-service protocols and never-but-fulfilled refunds proceed to be an issue. The future of the cruise industry remains very unclear, so it’s not completely unreasonable to be troubled about what next spring will appear to be.

The elite of the journey trade assembled for the World Travel Awards Caribbean Gala Ceremony 2020 to find out who amongst them had been crowned better of the most effective. World Travel Awards has revealed it will host its North America Gala Ceremony 2020 within the Thompson Okanagan, British Columbia. The leading journey business figureheads and decision-makers from across North America will attend what will mark WTA’s first ceremony in Canada. At the very least, neighboring nations similar to Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia should restart overland journey, suggests Willem Neimeijer, founding father of Khiri Travel and CEO of Yaana Ventures. “Thailand’s strategy to the crisis is totally totally different from that of European nations.

Georgians are free to travel to all countries throughout the EU, however aren't allowed to work. The first step to changing into official Europeans has been made.

<h3>Travel Companies In Batumi</h3>

Do you want lively or stress-free vacancy in absolutely new surrounding in multi climate Caucasus Region? Reach Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani icy peaks or stay in relaxing comfortable lodge on seaside. Choose any tour with our journey agency and use your alternative to make your wish true.

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Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan are the most important locations for vacationers. We supply guided and specialized tours, journey guides, and engaging reductions and packages.

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queernuck · 5 years

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again, i think that it is necessary to look at critiques and judge them based on their value, not just as flippant “takes” and so on

some great examples include discussing US Imperialism in Syria, the US support for the YPG and other Kurdish groups was absolutely, without a single doubt, conditional and was based on a shift from “YPG are terrorists” to “YPG are brave and fighting against ISIS” that was conditional on the YPG accepting US Aid, allowing for US military power to direct their actions, effectively using the Kurdish people as a kind of extension of military power. This meant that the US could go to war against ISIS, could do so in a way that opposed Assad, and kept with the general direction of US imperialist violence while only committing air assets and small deployments of Special Operations troops, ones who could be themselves part of the propaganda used to sell this to American audiences.

Now? The recoil of accepting American aid, of allowing American Imperialist support to dictate one’s own goals is occuring, and another American ally, Turkey, is almost certainly going to commit atrocities against the Kurdish people. This is going to go unanswered, America is not going to do anything about this and moreover any discussion of “our allies in Syria” leaves out the reasoning both behind Turkey’s actions and the way in which establishing a certain sort of governance was a goal of the YPG, how the YPG was at least nominally (if one does not want to claim genuinely) leftist. American joint patrols with Turkish forces, allied on the basis of NATO, American use of Turkey in strategic nuclear and other military considerations, American sales of arms to Turkey are not contradictory with this, but in fact a continuing policy of America using Kurds to justify imperialism before themselves watching the violence continue so long as it is convenient.

Liberals decrying this move are not doing so because they believe in. the YPG, its principles, or likely even particularly care about what will follow. They will do little, if anything, to discuss the role of Turkey as an American ally in breaking the YPG. Instead, ISIS and its supposed-existential threat to America will become the focus, will become part of what is discussed. It is not in support of the YPG that these politicians speak, it is in support of the Forever War, it is from the same place of imperialist ideology that criticizes Trump for attempting to better relations between the RoK and the DPRK by cancelling military exercises, it is Democrats determined to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan to continue Obama’s legacy and Republicans who will claim that, in fact, it is still Bush’s legacy but this is in fact a good thing.

discussing American imperialists leaving Syria is a question that genuinely at once poses two other questions: was the support given to the YPG ultimately worthwhile considering how it made them vulnerable to attack by ISIS and Turkey at the same time? and as a result, what exactly is a meaningful position when discussing it? weak and ineffective sanctions, war with a NATO member, misdirection at Iran? The meaningful discussion of exactly why accepting American imperialist support is counterrevolutionary, will lead to this exact kind of downfall, is coupled with how groups like Turkish Marxist-Leninists joined the YPG: the genuine ability to fight ISIS was an opportunity that was new, genuinely potentially-revolutionary, but Kurds were simply being used as a buffer between a target of invasion (Syria) and an ally (Turkey) until it was no longer so much. Leaves plenty of troops to go to Mali, or say, get ready for an invasion of Iran.

Similarly, the means by which large corporations such as the NBA, Disney (through ESPN), Blizzard, and others discuss Hong Kong in relation to China, two converging scandals (both involving voicing support for protests in Hong Kong) provides a phenomenal insight into how right-wing ideology is inserted into supposedly left-leaning discussions through various ideological maneuvers.

For players, they are well aware that their paycheck can be on the line when it comes to discussing issues, and so they often are sticking to ones where the demographics are on their side, where the league can monetize their supposed protest and use it to portray an image as a league that is socially conscious, that is self-aware, something beyond the corporation at hand. However, the careful means by which this is done become apparent rather quickly: discussions of racial justice and police brutality are allowed when it comes to NBA stars too big to shut down, but WNBA players can be silenced if they break too many boundaries. There is an awareness that they can only make so much critique before they begin to make themselves targets.

And indeed, American media thrives off of a kind of dual-acknowledgement: there is a recognition of China as an irreconcilable Other, but none at all of the means by which similar measures are instituted in American contexts. A right-winger talks about how easily China crumbles, comparing it to a “paper tiger” while talking about an effort to hamstring Blizzard in response to proactive censorship on their own part. Another discusses the way in which “free speech” should not be determined by corporations, a worthwhile discussion perhaps but one being offered specifically because it allows for an easy reactionary reading, because it dovetails with various platforms attempting to purge fascist content (again, not because fascism is to be opposed, but because it is harder to monetize in a polite, neoliberal fashion)

so much of politics has been signified by processes of consumption-production, so much of it is linked to the way in which one identifies with regard to acts of consumption, and this is not to contrast the “West” with that “Other” in China. Again, the NBA is at a crossroads here specifically because of how it is widely-watched across China, and it was the Rockets’ owner who started the whole thing, one of the most-watched teams within the league in China. The superficiality of expression in American culture begins to become clear when one looks at how exactly American companies control speech in America, couple willingly with a surveillance state, and the discourse on China coming from the right being openly anticommunist when linking it to various conspiracies, imagined or worse, resignified, that allow for the stoking of their fascist libidos.

the simplification of protests in Hong Kong to “pro-democracy” is so often a euphemism for the kind of protest supported by The Economist, a paper whose triumph-of-colonialism ideology is well-known, perhaps one of the most neoliberal and neocolonial publications running today. it is in desire of liberalization that they support these protests, in interest of creating embarrassments for the PRC in order to gain leverage within trade rather than any genuine concern for Hong Kongers, for the implication of extradition on leftist thought with regard to leftist criticism of China.

more generally, this ties into just how deeply-embedded fascism and its ironic aesthetics are in this website. equistrianrepublican is back as vaporwavevocap, fun or funny blogs are only a step or two removed from posters like thivus or porko-rosso (who have certainly not abandoned previous tendencies in posting) and the ability of posts of various sorts to find their way over to reactionary sides of tumblr is abundant. and yes, this includes reactionary leftism like stalin-defender having great posts about the IRA but worrying about how transness is a honeypot on tumblr and the REAL reason Yahoo let the website get devalued, how attempts to critique liberal ideation of sex work are supported as being against degeneracy, rather than in defense of sex workers, in defense of their arming and the recognition of exploitation in sex work as a fundamental issue and the changing of the work-form more generally a necessary discussion, in the way that some reject postmodernism as decadent and unnecessary in ways that attract reactionaries like flies and honey. it is in official-mugi being the person who least deserves that good url. it is in a lot of things, so many of them deniable or subtle, so many of them based on accepting a good-faith reading and spreading implicitly reactionary ideologies.

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randomrichards · 5 years

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Interesting Movies Coming in January 2019

So, begins another year showcasing movies that may fly over the radar.

January 11:

ASHES IN THE SNOW

Inspired by true events, Ashes in the Snow tells the story of a teenage girl used art to break the silence on an atrocity committed by the Soviet Union.

Set in 1941, the film examines Stalin’s brutal dismantling of the Baltic Region which deported many Lithuanians to Siberia. Many of them were convicted of treason and sentenced to a lifetime of labour. Among them is a 16-year-old girl named Lina (Bel Powley) and her family. But as she fights for survival, she finds her voice through art. In time she’s will use her art to expose what happened to her and her family.

I imagine this film will fall out of many people’s radar, shown only in art house theatres and film festivals. It’s a shame because this film shows a lot of potential in the trailer with an interesting real-life story. It sounds like a compelling David and Goliath story sure to gain acclaim. Thankfully, I have this blog to attract attention to films like this.

THE UPSIDE

Based on the French film The Intouchables, (which was inspired by a real-life story), The Upside tells the story of a bond between a rich quadriplegic man and an ex-con who assists him.

For the sake of his son, Dell (Kevin Hart) wants to get his life back together. To do that, he needs to get a job, or at least 3 signatures proving he’s interviewed for jobs or his parole is kaput. Meanwhile, billionaire Phillip (Bryan Cranston) needs assistance since he’s paralyzed from the neck down and he can’t stand the patronizing attitudes of home care applicants (much to his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) chagrin). Then Dell barges in to the interview and impresses Philip with his abrasive demeanor. So, Dell’s hired.

Now Dell gets to bask in the high life living in the Penthouse with Philip. Of course, there is the problem of Phillip having no experience taking care of a person with disabilities. Hell, he crosses his legs at the sight of a catheter. But what Philip likes about him is the fact Dell doesn’t pity him. As they work, they form a bond through their no-BS attitudes.

It’s common for Hollywood to remake foreign language films. What’s weird about this one is that the original is based on a true story and they change the location from France to America. It feels like a disservice toward the people who inspired these films. One could argue this is a way to garner an audience who don’t watch movies with subtitles, but that feels incredibly unfair to the original movie. Those people missed a fantastic performance by Omar Sy. But I digress.

You got some great actors in this film. You can’t go wrong with Cranston, who has delivered on Nicole Kidman, who is seeing a reemergence of her career with an Oscar Nomination (Lion), Emmy Win (Big Little Lies) and that badass fight scene in the recent box office hit Aquaman. But the one that stands out the most was Kevin Hart. He has sparked a major fanbase with an over the top, self-deprecating comedy style. He’s applied the same style in his movies, resulting in few hits (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) and many misses (Think Like a Man). Though there is a hint of his exaggerated acting, it will be interesting to see him give a more grounded performance. Unfortunately, he’s got big shoes to fill with Omar Sy’s award winning performance in the previous film.

There is a danger of this being sappy and there is a hint of that. But I like to give films like this a chance.

January 18:

GIRL

All the way from Belgium comes this coming of age tale of a transgender teenage girl struggling to achieve her dream of becoming a ballet dancer.

We follow Lara (Victor Polster) through an 8-week trial period at a prestigious Ballet Academy. She’s got a bit of a ways to go before her skills are up to par with the Academy’s standards. At the same time, she’s counting the day before her hormone treatment. But can she handle the stress of the Academy?

This film was a hit at the Cannes film festival and it has recently been nominated at the Golden Globe Awards. While the film has received critical praise, there is still controversy over the casting of a ci-gender boy to play a transgender girl. Yes, it’s great to see transgender girls getting representation and Polster disappears into the character, but it still doesn’t change the fact that transgender actors can’t seem to get role playing transgender character. Writer/Director Lukas Dhont clearly means well, but this matter’s much more complicated. It’s a shame because this seems like a compelling movie.

Can you still enjoy this movie despite this controversy? It’s going to be complicated.

GLASS

Never in my life would I have ever imagined a Shyamalan Cinematic universe. Of course, it didn’t help that his films have been more flops than hit. But he took us by surprise when that Bruce Willis cameo revealed Split to be an indirect sequel to his underrated hit Unbreakable. And now both films collide in Glass.

After 19 years, we finally find out what’s happened to the literally unbreakable David Dunn (Bruce Willis). After years using his super strength, invincibility and psychic visions for the greater good, he finds himself confined to a mental institution. He finds himself face to face with Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), his comic book obsessed arch nemesis who goes by the name Mr. Glass. Also, there is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a disturbed man with 23 personality who imprisons and kills teenage girls. With them altogether, Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) hopes to cure them of their “delusions.” Mr. Glass seizes this opportunity for a Supervillain team up with Kevin Wendell Crumb. So, he unleashes The Beast, Kevin’s animalistic personality with super strength and an aggressive thirst for blood. With these two out of the hospital and reigning terror on the world, it’s up to David to stop them.

This film also sees Anya Taylor-Joy reprise her role as Casey, the teenage girl who brought down Kevin in Split.

M. Night Shyamalan is quite a fascinating figure. He came out of nowhere and took everyone by surprise with The Sixth Sense. The fact he was able to stick himself into a zeitgeist in his first movie alone is a near miracle. But with the praise came high expectations. Though Unbreakable and Signs earned acclaim, none of Shyamalan’s films were of the same level. And then there were the flops. Oooh the flops. He released so many bad movies that he became a self-parody.

There were a few factors contributing to Shyamalan’s fall from grace. I mentioned the expectations, which puts a lot of pressure on any new director. Eventually, the fame went to Shyamalan’s head, giving him a misplaced sense of self-importance. That self-importance seeped into his films, building a pretensions tone. He also relied a bit too much on quirkiness, resulting in unintentionally hilarious moments. It didn’t help that pop culture only associated him with plot twists, which kind of stuck him in a corner.

But then two factors turned his career around. First was Wayward Pines, a Twin Peaks-like series where Shyamalan’s emphasis on quirks became an advantage. In that same year, he stepped out of his comfort zone with The Visit, a found footage horror movie that got Shyamalan his groove back. And the deal was sealed with Split. Through these films, Shyamalan seemed to have let go of his pretentiousness and had fun with them. I hope he keeps this up for his sake.

January 25

SERENITY

In this thriller, Matthew McConaughey plays fishing boat captain Baker Dill. He was enjoying a quiet, simple life hosting tours off the tropical Plymouth Island, when along comes his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway). She’s married to a violent man (Jason Clarke) and she wants him gone. So, she wants Dill to take him on a fishing excursion where Dill can leave him swimming with the fishes. The question is, will he go through with it.

This premise plays a lot like a film noir, from the rugged protagonist facing the past he’s trying to forget to the femme fatale leading him down a dark path. I imagine Baker Dill will confront many dilemmas that will reveal his true self.

There’s a notable growth of publicity for this movie. But publicity doesn’t equal quality. It could turn out to be a surprise sleeper hit like Hell or High Water or forgettable flop. Writer/director Steven Knight has gone either way, having written critical darlings like Dirty Pretty Things and hits like the series Peaky Blinders. He’s also wrote the flop The Girl in the Spider’s Web and the forgettable series Taboo. So, this film could go either way.

January 30

THE WILD PEAR TREE

From the man behind the Palme D’or winning Winter Sleep comes another tale of an artist secluding himself in a remote location.

Young writer Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) returns to his home after graduating from college. He has a bit of trouble fitting in to the rural living of this small village while he writes. But he has bigger problems with his father Idris (Murat Cemcir) debts growing out of control. Now the collectors are targeting Idris through his son. This also leaves him with little money to publish his stories.

It’s going to be a huge challenge to get butts in seats for this movie. Not only is this film entirely in Turkish, but it’s also three hours long. Theatres usually prefer the movies to be under two hours so they can be shown more and sell more tickets. Still, Nuri Bilge Ceylan had already gained huge acclaim for the aforementioned Winter Sleep, a tale of a former actor who runs a remote hotel while dealing with his family. This film seems to be garnering similar acclaim.

It’s in moments like these that I wished I had taken the time to watch his previous movies. I would have had a better opportunity to discuss what makes Ceylan’s films so special to its audiences. But I didn’t and that ship has sailed.

#ashes in the snow #glass #girl #winter sleep #the upside #the wild pear tree #nuri bilge ceylan #serenity

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ababycrest9-blog · 6 years

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Parenting Jittery

Many parents assume that homeschooling provides them the very best education can be had through home schooling. This could adequately become the case but you can find certainly things you should know what home schooling entails. The next article below will give you helpful home schooling tips around.Your children will end up more productive when homeschooling when you let them take breaks. Children cannot spend long hours reading through books. Let them run in the yard or get some good exercise.Everyone is likely to recharge happily from this downtime. Speak with other homeschooling families and even continue outings together. This can be fun factor of outings and socializing opportunities. Also you can get group discount rates at different places you get to by doing this.Put in place a region for your personal kids to possess crafts and arts they are able to use while you are teaching older kids. Ask teenagers to train their youngsters. This allows everyone learn and will instill confidence.It could feel overwhelming attempting to handle all of the different aspects of becoming a teacher. You are able to better any homeschooling experience by attending classes and seminars.Hands-on lessons can certainly make teaching your youngsters an effective method to teach children. You might cook a dish through the country you happen to be studying. If they are researching Stalin, an illustration of this can be making cabbage rolls and perogies. If you are researching WWII then consider visiting a military museum or perhaps a historical site. Learning with all senses helps properly absorb information.Create a plan for your homeschooling venture accordingly. Set up a budget for each child. Ensure you account for unexpected expenses.Family vacations are a fantastic additional learning experience. Just have a day a report day. You and your family will all have a blast togehter while learning about a new challenge.Set aside a classroom area which is well supplied and and conducive to learning.Choose a spot that is certainly located far from where your son or daughter normally plays. Make certain your children have some place to store supplies when not being used.You must make the kids skills that they can use in life. It is thusly vital that you work both aspects to your lesson plan. Everyone knows the importance of academic studies, but some do not know how important the lifestyle skills of gardening, gardening and driving are simply as crucial. You are able to teach both sets of skills using the right approach. While teaching your kids about plants and their life cycle, give you a class on biology!Can you want to teach over a couple kids? You need to know the way your discipline style will work. If you do not set clear expectations or rules and boundaries, it will likely be hard to maintain your kids focused appropriately. It will be possible to produce the kids excel in learning, by accurately assessing what you can do to dish out discipline and working on your weaknesses.Take the time to retain family relationships while homeschooling. Getting together with your husband or wife can assist you keep leisure time that may be easily lost to homeschooling. Make sure your spouse and members of the family learn how much they still are. Spending at least time with one other each day can make the difference.Have a good source of crafts handy when you and your children. It is possible to one-on-one with one child do a form of art project when you are teaching other. Encourage your kids being creative with whatever they opt to make. This can let your child to imagine outside of the self and box motivation.Many parents decided that homeschooling is the greatest option for their loved ones. It is essential to keep yourself well-informed regarding this learning style first when you are among that group. After reading this article, you should have a greater idea if homeschooling is right for your loved ones.

#Arts and Crafts

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slovenlyrecordings · 6 years

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A ton of reviews just in courtesy of Terminal Boredom (they still hate 10" records):

ANMLS s/t LP Chilean street punko's who love to shout together - a lot and often. Reminiscent of 80's Spanish language boot-stompers Cicatriz, Eskorbuto and the like, but with added filth-blown guitars that are left tryna' cut through layers of amp cone dust and a seeping to the surface 70's rock cockpunch. The hardcore leanings and gang vocals calm a tad as the sides play on and I'm starting to hear echoes of John Reis riffage in the aptly titled "Instrumental" and the flip's opener, "V'amanos De La Ciudad". Thanks to "Pirata" they practically give you an Oi anthem at the end. Sort of a shock to see Slovenly head in this direction, as I'd expect the band to hook up with Lengua Armada, Sorry State or some other stateside stable of cellar dwellers. Is Ruleta Rusa still active? These cats should team up with them for a US stretch. Either way, I have no real knowledge of international hardcore (outside of Italy), so I'm gonna' shut up now and let you dig in on your own.(RSF)

The Cavemen "Nuke Earth" LP "Nuke Earth" is the third time these sleaze-Zealanders have been found rifling through the rubbage bins of garage shock past to toss a full platter. The best tracks within float to the surface - kinda' like pull tabs or smoke butts floating in the fetid water of a gas station squeegee bucket - and scramble about, attempting to create something along the line of a budget-punker's K-Tel collection. These cavemanish boys crank things off with "Lust For Evil" a tune that's got one boot planted firmly in the Oblivians camp and the other can be found kicking the 'Tards squarely in the gonads. Leather-jacketed riff warriors, hopped up on CPC (get it?!) and unleashing dueling leads and hostile vibes aplenty. "Janey" lightens things a tinge with some boozy balladry and organ rottens the rock during tunes like "Batshit Crazy" and "Concrete Town" in a way that could bring both Lost Sounds lovers, Spits fanatics and tattooed MCD car-show greasers lovingly together for a sock hop. Duster-huffers will rejoice to the dum-dum Dictator clunk of "Chernobyl Baby" and "Thug" which reeling in a meaty Gizmos/Penetrators spew. "Dont Wanna Hang" strips veneers in guitar frazzle and New Bomb Turk velocity. It's like having the Las Vegas Shakedown start up again, right there on your very own turntable! The parts may be aftermarket, but there's gonna' be some paunchy yet pleased turkeys around these forums real soon. (RSF)

ぐうたら狂 Gūtara KYŌ s/t 10” Damn, this here is a firecracker! What lies within these grooves are obliterated Teengener-ized riffs, and demented psycho-wails, all walloping upside the punk velocity of something akin to prime 80's Gauze. "Drive" got a lead that's reminiscent of a garage slop take of an old Soundgarden tune (I'm dead serious!) and it's pokin' out of a deteriorating Stalin bootleg. "Daydream" and "It's Gotta Be You" ride along hardcore gallops, rendered futile due to some of the gnarliest production filth since Tim Kerr was knob twisting. The shining light in all this scree would be the soulful belter "Romance" that kicks off the flip. This gold star doom rocker features strained crooning and a truly putrid solo that's - of course - blown all to snuff. It wouldn't feel outta' place on that 'Tokyo Flashback' sampler at all. Fo' real tho' - this platter could clear the sinuses of the most jaded of High Rise fan. Hell, Gutara Kyo is good enough to make me overlook the fact these songs are pressed up on the lamest of all formats (the dreaded 10") with a goddamn dumb 45 hole. Hey Pete, knock it off! All snark aside, I'd still tell folks to buy this, even if it was only available on floppy disc. Scum Stats: 100 copies pressed up on red and black splatterwax.(RSF)

Hand & Leg s/t LP Greek duo doing their best impersonation of that gluey/Krauty/fuzz-buzzy sound that the French has dominated for the past decade. This co-ed bass and drums act strips their music down to the bleached bone, leaving the sorta' repetitive weed-wacker chops and threadbare beats that Wire fans should froth over. Standout tracks like "Dogshit Country" lighten the low plod load a smidge, letting the high strings shine as if Godheadsilo was taking on a Volt tune. "Bloody Hole" closes us shop in a full two minutes of tone drone and irritated wail before the "song" proper takes flight within a spattered cacophony of pie-plate thwack and chanted vocals. Soothing to one's skull as This Heat. Dig yer feet in the sand, people. Scum Stats: 100 on clear vinyl.(RSF)

Häxxan "The Magnificent Planet Of Alien Vampiro II"" LP Nasally Israeli psych-boogie, for the moderne youth market. The press release mentions playing with Ty and them Fuzz comparisons are pretty on point in these here grooves. They also trot out bratty, childlike pop tantrums that should speak to the Burgerooligans that follow these updates as well. What you mostly get on this is quiet/loud dynamics pushing out a Black Angels/Frijid Pink hybrid. There's quite a bit of local flavor in their guitar pyrotechnics, so world-beat freaks and psych aficionados should perk up. Most of it makes for a fine fried background rock, but nothing is really sticking to my maw. A couple of tracks do stand out - "Circle Of Quantum" and "Snakes In My Hair" - both nearly seared my eyebrows off like the best moments of C.A. Quintet "Trip Thru Hell" with swirling, woozy leads and vocals lost in the arid desert wind. The whole ride is easy to digest and makes for decent afternoon accompaniment, but gotta' say I wanted more like those two aforementioned tracks. Better than the countless Ty & Dwyer clones we've had to weather so far. Better than the King Gizzard knock-offs to come. Let's just be happy today.(RSF)

Νόμος 751 (Nomos 751) s/t LP Electroshok-rockers that clatter along like a Grecian Metal Urbain. Drum machine robot riddims and twisted rockabilly riffs fighting against various space trash splatter and the occasional Spits-take on skate punk. There's a Grande Triple Alliance vibe rippling underneath that's hard to shake as well as more than a couple nods in the early Red Mass direction I use to enjoy (long before that act stank it up with Mac Demarco's hair-footed guest spots). I should ramble more about the tracks involved, but my janky-assed computer's 'bout to crash for yet another twenty minute interval - so I'm just gonna' go pogo about like some metaloid mutant instead. Give 'er a go!(RSF)

Proto Idiot "Leisure Opportunity" LP How the hell did the Hipshakes connection escape me?! Proto Idiot is way less Oblivian and way more Adverts than the 'shakes ever were. This here's a jagged pop-gone-puke to tunes like "Better Way Of Life" and "Angry Vision" - the sorta' stuff Jaytard did solo and that Useless Eater kid slung about. Comparisons to Devoto-era Buzzcocks seems apt, and there's a tad of 'Chairs Missing' up in here too. Honestly, either this is a love letter to the entire UK punker past catalog or I'm just an asshole who thinks so 'cuz of the English accent. Hey - it's the GG King Of The UK! Still, I'm perplexed that I never knew the Hipshakes were related. I'm bad at this game. I'd way rather party with this Proto Idiot than those stuffy shirted Protomartyr's out there. Good Fun. 'Nuff said. Scum Stats: 100 on green vinyl.(RSF)

Subsonics "Flesh Colored Paint" LP In this time of reunions around the corner for every wang-dang-doodle of a band that falls under the Budget Rock blanket, it shocks me to no end that Atlanta's Subsonics have never even given up. I've evidently been in the dark for nearly a decade (Sorry Slovenly/Sorry Subsonics.) as "Flesh Colored Paint" is their eighth full length. The band continues to do what they do best - muggy southern stomp filtered through Marc Bolan flutter and a Cramps-ian cha-cha heel strut. This sorta' glitter shimmer fits snugly nestled in the crotch region, somewhere between American Death Ray, Danny & The Darleans and so on. They've always been in my peripheral and I've witnessed them bring quite a solid live revue in my times, but they've never seemed tough enough to break me during my boozy-fueled heyday. NOW - on the other hand - being older, wiser and actually warming up to the voice of Brian Ferry - this stuff is pretty damn sharp! I'm fully locked down on the track "Begging Hands" here, which proves beyond any doubt that these swingers are as big of fans of Radley Metzger's 'Score' skinflick as I am. Elsewhere they beat on the traps like a Black Time light, less set on grate and more on the grind. "Die A Little", "Cold Cold World" and "In The Black Spot" ride in the Velvet's lil' Reed wagon, possibly playing at the wrong pitch. "I Must Be Poisoned" and "I'm The Most Popular Boy In Town" are cut from the same girl group worship and sequenced catsuit that Kid Congo stitches together with his Pink Monkey Birds. "Permanent Thaw" fires off that Black-Angels-Death violin scrape along its woozy train track clack and tunes like "Why Should Anybody Care At All" feature squirrelly, ragged soloing, as if front-mouth and string-slinger Clay Reed was dry humping his gee-tar on the studio floor (and chances are, he did). A good party platter for the red eyed sect. Now while we're at it, let's wax up them early WorryBird CDs!(RSF)

The Monsieurs "Deux” LP Knowing how much I loved Tunnel Of Love - one of the finest bombastic blowouts to cross my blurred vision in the early aughts - I feel like a lamestain for sleeping on this act for so long. Well, I fixed that over the past few months. Here I am, warming by the fire during this wintry bluster and ingesting another fine Andy MacBain release. Between this stuff and the Andy California EP, he's keeping Slovenly's Gladiators on the garbage rock radar (not that they ever really fell of it in the first place). The opener "Burning Flame" and "I Will Run" are straight up crash/bang shards of garage violence and if you said to me these were lost Tunnel Of Love tracks, I wouldn't argue it one bit. Things chill and take pop-ier turns within tunes like "Suburban Girls" and "At The Hop". Not saying cutesy levels of pop, but there's a definite whaff of catchy albeit retched perfection ala' Nobunny or Ramones girl group grabs. The femmes on deck keep Andy's cock-swingin' machismo at bay, adding great touches of Toody-esque back ups, forceful fuzzed power chords and abusive can bashing. "Get Right Get Ready" is rears a Karp riff and shoves it, clawing smack into the face of some delirious Dollrod slop. That's not a bad place to be - crawling around in a metallic Danny Kroha muck. Wrapping this fast lil' fucker up is "My War", which brings all the above elements to a broil, splattering about like a scorched Love cover turned beat-punk brat psych and going gloriously wrong. A wooly ride. Will ride again. Scum Stats: 100 copies on orange.(RSF)

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kittenonwheels · 6 years

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Crucial Tips For Homeschooling Your Kid The Right Way

Many parents feel their kids usually do not get adequate attention in public areas school. In case you are one of these brilliant parents, you may decide to consider homeschooling. Although it might appear easy, you continue to require the proper information to get it done. These article will provide you with several guidelines to help you within your homeschooling endeavors. While you may not would like children getting together with kids from public school, they require social interaction along with other kids. Your children must have play dates with other individuals within the neighborhood. You are able to take your kids on the field visit to the regional playground plus they can interact there. They could also do activities this type of sports, clubs, or any other fun things. The greatest advantage to homeschooling is the opportunity to make sure that your child learns all of that they require because of teaching them in the manner that fits them best. math tuition jc For instance, your son or daughter may well be a kinesthetic learner, therefore you can make hands-on lessons to engage his unique learning style. Doing this helps you to foster success. Perform some learning yourself about homeschooling before you begin. You can find a large number of responsibilities being a teacher for the child. Classes and seminars are excellent causes of inspiration and hands-on guidance for a lot of elements of homeschooling. If you're already homeschooling, it wouldn't hurt to go to these in your on-going education. Provide many hands-on lessons. A good way to accomplish this is via the meals of foreign cultures you might be studying. When studying Stalin, you are able to incorporate cabbage rolls and perogies in your menus. When studying in regards to a war, get them prepare foods from each country active in the battles. Once the child involves most of his senses in mastering, more details could be absorbed. Network with other individuals that are homeschooling their kids. There are millions of people throughout the Usa that are opting to homeschool. It is possible to find people with similar goals. You will discover crucial homeschooling information off their homeschooling parents, particularly if you are simply beginning. They are going to also offer you support. The prosperity of your kids is based on how good you prepare them in the future. Homeschooling is an excellent method to make sure they may be obtaining the best education possible, with no teacher could be more dedicated than you. The tips and hints we have given can help you give your kid an excellent spot to learn.

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beautifulbreadnerd-blog · 7 years

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Get Running For Running Games

If you like to play games that are action packed, you will find many free games online that allow you to do just that. There are many free downloadable games that you can play online or download to play later. Below, we have listed five really cool action games. Keep reading and you will learn more about 5 of the top action games online. They include Bleach Training 2, Now You Know Better, Horse Rancher, Thing Thing 3 and 3-D Missile. 1.Bleach Training 2: Bleaches are powerful and feared group of people that live in Rukongai. They are protectors of their world. You are brought to Rukongai and you must learn how to become Bleach. You must learn how to fight so that you can defeat your enemies. 2.Now You Know Better: Now You Know Better is a game show that gives you a chance to win one million dollars. You are asked various trivia questions, can download recipes and enter various sweepstakes. 3.Horse Rancher: In the game Horse Ranch, you have to take charge and manage a ranch. You get three years to test your skill as a horse rancher. To make money, you can purchase horses and race them. Once you start your ranch, you will start getting invited to horse races. They do require an entry fee, so part of your earnings will go toward entering races, so be sure to budget and of course, win. 4.Thing Thing 3:Thing Thing 3 is the third game in the series. It is created by Diseased Productions. Each game in the series has become extremely popular. You get a ton of weapons and are able to customize your characters. The game is full of action and is really violent. 5.3-D Missile: 3-D Missile involves you guiding a missile through a tunnel. You have to avoid crashing the missile and must make it out of a tunnel without crashing it. You will fly through the holes of obstacles that rotate. If you survive, you get to make it to the next level. Your mouse controls your missile. No need to spend a ton of money purchasing high priced console games. You can find plenty of free games that will quell your itch for action. There are many free games online that will provide you plenty of action and thrills. You will also find games that will fit your temperament. If you like violence and guns, you will plenty of action games that provide you with the opportunity to shoot to your hearts desire. If you are a little meeker, but still like action, you may find that trivia, action games are a better fit. If you aren't sure where to begin when looking for action games, take a look at Bleach Training 2, Now You Know Better, Horse Rancher, Thing Thing 3 and 3-D Missile.

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