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isthatmanahimbo · 1 year

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Today’s article has actually been finished for a while, but we elected not to post it as it was just finished on the day of voice actor Billy Kametz’s untimely passing. Today we present a character much beloved in the meme community, the man, the myth, the legend: he is Ferdinand von Aegir.

Ferdinand is a playable unit character in Fire Emblem Three Houses is a playable character unit from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, released on the Nintendo Switch in 2019. As we are familiar, the basic idea of the Fire Emblem franchise is to develop units for strategic RNG combat – Three Houses takes this a step further and allows you to develop the same units over an extended period of time along straight paths or to make lateral jumps into unrelated classes. This is especially true with today's subject, for reasons we will discuss.

Originating as a member of the Black Eagle house from the Adrestian Empire, Ferdinand fills a few roles within the party and within the narrative. Notably, he is the self-proclaimed rival of future-Emperor Edelgard, and scion son of House Aegir which has until the events of the game been in control of the Empire from the shadows of bureaucratic red tape. He touts the value of nobility both in story cut-scenes and in his support conversations, and his character arc is often considered one of the better written ones in the game. As a unit, he is the house's resident Horse Boy, and boasts no proficiency weaknesses (a trait only shared by a handful of other units), meaning that he can feasibly go down any class path with little effort – the tradeoff to this his notoriously difficult recruitment requirement of Heavy Armor proficiency.

When discussing Ferdinand, it is easy to know where to begin: he is referred to by majority of the fandom as "Sunshine Boy", and for good reason! From the very beginning of the game, Ferdinand is brimming with enthusiasm and a do-good energy in everything that he does – who here isn't familiar with his proclamation of his name every single time you select his unit in combat? His stringent adherence to things he considers a noble's duty are what make him such a rich character (pun intended), and he often chafes at some of the callousness of antagonist characters, wanting to insert himself into the forefront of the action when possible. But it isn't just with aggression that he displays his kindness – what sets him apart from other noble characters in the game is his willingness and his eagerness to listen to his companions, and his respect for their opinions once voiced. His association with nobility equating to good-heartedness is so deep that it is even ingrained into his character design – after the timeskip he sports an incredible mane of long hair, and when it comes up in conversation it is revealed that he fell into a depression at the reveal his family's involvement in villainy and simply didn't cut his hair for five years.

This pure-hearted naievety doesn't merely present itself in a do-good attitude, either. Because he was raised to believe he can do anything (and, with the right direction, he often can thanks to his skill proficiencies), Ferdinand can often make blindly optimistic decisions that have the potential to bite him in the butt. In one instance after hearing that Edelgard, his self-proclaimed eternal rival, was able to kill a monster on her own, his sheer belief in his superiority causes him to attempt to fight two monsters at the same time, leading to Byleth needing to step in to save his life. Another instance of this is during a conversation with Dorothea, who revealed she does not like him due to his pride in his noble stature – in response to this, Ferdinand bakes her pastries to win her over, and she promptly points out that he did none of the actual hard work of harvesting or refining the materials, leaving him flummoxed. This author would not go so far as to call him unintelligent, as it is clear he has all the benefit and privilege of his station and the private education that goes with it, but it must be addressed that for much of the game, Ferdinand has a shallow, rose-colored view of the world, and does little deep consideration of any given situation unless forced. Big thinker, this boy is not.

But now we must get into Ferdinand's himbo-deficiencies. Although handsome, Ferdinand is not necessarily spectacular in his physical stature. His in-game body model is similar to many of his peers, if a bit slighter, and any buffness is not something that comes up in conversation. His base Strength stat is on the higher side, but his base Strength growth is nothing special. While it is true that he often becomes an invaluable unit in most playthroughs, much of this is the result of careful strategizing using the class system rather than his inherent talents (which actually focus more on speed and hitting quickly multiple times) - because of heavy reliance on RNG, it is possible that Ferdinand may need some hand holding and special attention for his stats to fall in line.

But we could forgive a good beefy Ferdinand unit his physical faults if it were not for his unfortunate lack in the Chad department. This is not to say that Ferdinand is not a valued member of his teams, but it is to say that his teammates have to do rather more digging to get to his soft gooey center. While the player has the benefit of seeing Ferdinand as a whole, from the beginning of his arc to end, and with all characters, many of Ferdinand's peers find him obnoxious, abrasive, and stubbornly reliant on his privilege. Indeed, many of Ferdinand's initial support conversations are outright hostile, well into A support range – and unlike other hostile character interactions, Ferdinand is mostly the recipient of this bad blood through actions of his own doing. He stumbles and gets off on the wrong foot, and spends the rest of his support chains making up for his poor first impressions. It is through these conversations that he learns and grows as a person, but it is also through these conversations that we see that Ferdinand's classmates...initially don't like him all that much. Where we the audience see our beloved Sunshine Boy, the rest of Garreg Mach sees that loud rich kid who tells everyone else to get good without the benefit of his good intentions.

In the end, the real Ferdinand von Aegir were the friends we made along the way – but he is no Ferdinand von Himbo.

Total Himbo Score: 15

If you’re able, please consider donating a few dollars to the Colon Cancer Coalition.

#is that man a himbo?#false friends! rating: not a himbo #fire emblem #fire emblem: three houses #fe3h #fe16 #ferdinand von aegir #ferdinand fire emblem #ferdinand fe3h

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denimbex1986 · 9 months

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'Ask four random people to name their favorite Christopher Nolan film and you might get four different answers. Ask the four main stars of Nolan's new movie Oppenheimer...that question and that's definitely the case, as EW discovers when Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr. share their take on his filmography (even Nolan himself offers a suggestion) during our latest Around the Table conversation.

"I love Dunkirk," says Blunt. "I've seen that, like, 20 times."

"My wife and I watched The Prestige, I think, four days in a row when it came out," says Damon. "But I love Inception as well. That's kind of an impossible question. It's like saying, what's your favorite Hitchcock movie?"

"You're in all of them," Blunt says to Murphy, whose professional relationship with Nolan dates back to 2005's Batman Begins in which the actor played the role of Dr. Jonathan Crane.

"No, I'm not," the actor politely corrects. "I remember seeing Interstellar in IMAX, on my own. I just remember coming out in a terrible state. It was so emotional."

"Did no one else want to watch it with you?" jokes Blunt.

"I love escaping from the house," says Murphy. "My kids were little. But it's so emotional, that movie, that always gets me every time."

"I can't answer the question but I want to make the case for Dunkirk," says Nolan, who cast Murphy in the film as the survivor of a U-boat attack named in the credits as "Shivering soldier." "When I sent Cillian the script, he wasn't entirely enthusiastic about playing the character. You actually called me up and went like, 'Sure, I'll do it because I want to work with you, but couldn't I be a Spitfire pilot instead?' And I said 'No, I need you out on that boat.' So I convinced you, and then you're out on the boat, and you're diving in the water off the wreck, and feeling more and more miserable about it all. The character doesn't have a name, all that. But cut to a couple years later, I went to buy the box set of Peaky Blinders and on the back it said: Cillian 'Dunkirk' Murphy. I was like, job done!"

It's a good answer. But Downey has an arguably better one.

"Many people will say this is your greatest film and a culmination of aspects of every film you've ever done," says the actor to Nolan. "So it's almost like Good Will Hunting: You've made this equation where you're now at the end of the chalkboard, and what the heck would you do next? But we believe in you, sir. So my favorite film of yours is whatever the heck you do after this, because you'd better come up with something amazing."

Oppenheimer stars Murphy as theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called "father of the atomic bomb." Blunt plays Oppenheimer's wife Kitty; Damon portrays General Leslie Groves, the man responsible for putting Oppenheimer in charge of the Manhattan Project; and Downey is Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss.'

#Christopher Nolan #Oppenheimer #Cillian Murphy #Matt Damon #Robert Downey Jr.#Emily Blunt #Lewis Strauss #Leslie Groves #Kitty #Good Will Hunting #Dunkirk #Interstellar #The Prestige #Inception #Peaky Blinders #Batman Begins #Dr. Jonathan Crane

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ohworm-writes · 1 year

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✰☆★—WORKS IN PROGRESS—★☆✰

“Most opportunities are created by luck. It takes SKILL to grasp those opportunities and turn it into success.”

✪ WHATS A WORK IN PROGRESS ✪

A work in progress, or WIP, page is as it sounds. It’s a page that documents and keeps track of the progress an author is making in their work. Similarly, it’s used to show any enjoyers of the author’s work how much progress they’ve made on something, possibly how long they intend to take to finish it, hard publication dates, or anything of the like.

✪ ARE YOU CURRENTLY WRITING ANYTHING ✪

At the moment, I have SEVERAL pieces of writing that I am working on, from a multitude of fandoms at that. Below, you will be able to see the fandom, character, title, summary, current word count and percentage progress on the work (if applicable) below.

✪ CURRENT WORKS IN PROGRESS ✪

The Golden Hour (cc!Jschlatt x gn!Reader) CONTENT CREATOR

Telling people personal things is... difficult, to say the least. You could have known the person all your life, you could have trusted them with thousands of secrets before, you could share a bed and a home with them, but that doesn’t always equate to being comfortable with telling them you’re struggling. Schlatt has this issue, and it tears him up inside just thinking about it. Why is he so helpless? He’s not, of course. But... he needs someone else—someone he loves and trusts with his life and more—to disagree with him.

1.0k Word Count ... ... ... ... 78% Progression

Sleight of Hand (The Grabber x gn!Reader) ACTOR

After many long, grueling months, your college classes finally let out for the summer, child-like adults leaping and bounding out of the building ready to party and get drunk and whatever else college students do for fun. You, however? Oh, you’ve chosen to hit up a nearby magicians store to pick up some cards to learn... sleight of hand magic. You’ve never tried it before, sure, but a kind and handsome stranger nearby is more than happy to show you the ropes.

0.4k Word Count ... ... ... ... 14% Progression

Untitled (Alastor x gn!Reader) HAZBIN HOTEL

0.3k Word Count ... ... ... ... 39% Progression

Join the One Percent! (cc!Jschlatt x gn!reader) CONTENT CREATOR

0.0k Word Count ... ... ... ... 0% Progression

Untitled (cc!Jschlatt x gn!reader) CONTENT CREATOR

0.0k Word Count ... ... ... ... 0% Progression

The House We Used to Live In (c!modern!Technoblade x gn!reader) MCYT

2.1k Word Count ... ... ... ... 15% Progression

A God In a Sea of Fools (c!god!Technoblade x gn!deity!Reader) MCYT

3.2k Word Count ... ... ... ... 20% Progression

Untitled (Alan Grant x gn!Reader) JURASSIC PARK

0.6k Word Count ... ... ... ... 37% Progression

#wip #wips #work in progress #works in progress #navi #navigation #ohworm-writes #Last updated 11/28/2022

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therealvinelle · 3 years

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I'd be very interested in the differences between book and movie Carlisle, like the one you did for Aro. If you've already done one sorry, I didn't see it when looking through tags though

(The Aro post referenced.)

First of, let me say how sorry I am that you waited so long for a reply. In my defense, I had to rewatch the movies first. Then I had to recover from watching the movies.

There’s a part 1 to this post, explaining my thoughts on the actor they cast for the part.

First, I’ll just say that I think the movies made two big mistakes with Carlisle. These two mistakes are the main reasons why I disown movie!Carlisle to the extent I do.

One, he became very Stepford. This is the big issue with the casting: he now comfortably fits the dad role, and he never deviates from it. As all the Cullens (well, all the characters in the movies, not just the Cullens) are flattened out and made hollowed versions of themselves. They become a Stepford family. Why do these people stick together and play house? Because they’re the Cullens. What will you see if you poke beneath the surface? Nothing.

I know Carlisle does not appear to deviate from the dad role in the books either, what I mean is that he is a person in those books. He was a person in his own right long before any of the Cullens had even been born, he had friends everywhere and a life of his own, and he continues to lead this social butterfly life with his family by his side. When he steps out of the house he does not blink out of existence. He is a family man, but he’s other things as well. Movie Carlisle is not.

Two, he’s barely in these movies, to the point where he could have been cut. What actually is his character? What drives him? Who is this blond guy who has taken the “father” slot in the Cullen household?

If you’ve only seen the movies, you sincerely won’t know.

Yes, he is a tertiary character in the books, but Dumbledore and Voldemort are tertiary to Harry Potter in the same way. They have no screen time, but remove Dumbledore and your story starts scrambling. Carlisle is tertiary, but he is still an important character. He’s the reason the Cullens are the way they are, why Edward is the way he is, he is the heart of the family. Take him out of the equation, or neuter him like the movies did, and the Cullens are like an old tradition that once meant something. They go through the motions of Cullen-ing because that’s what they do, what they’ve always done, but they have no deeper reason to do it. They drink animal blood and go to high school because- well, because fuck you audience, that’s why. Why exactly is Carlisle a doctor?

Carlisle of the movies explains none of these things, is at no point important, checks none of the points book Carlisle did. He’s a placeholder, not a character.

Even little things, like book!Carlisle gathering his friends in Breaking Dawn, makes sense since we know he spent centuries exploring the world and getting to know other vampires. Movie Carlisle spawned into existence with no mention of any vampire network, so who knows where he found all these friends.

With that, let’s go through his failings movie by movie.

Twilight

Carlisle of the first movie is barely in it.

He is introduced to us as a dashing doctor, alright, so far, so good.

Then, when Bella learns he is a vampire, he acts exactly the same as ever. Book Carlisle didn’t, he kept his distance and was very set on not scaring the human:

They smiled in welcome, but made no move to approach us. Trying not to frighten me, I guessed.

"Carlisle, Esme," Edward's voice broke the short silence, "this is Bella."

"You're very welcome, Bella." Carlisle's step was measured, careful as he approached me. He raised his hand tentatively, and I stepped forward to shake hands with him. (Twilight, page 153)

This is a vampire, a very kind and thoughtful vampire who is in “don’t make Edward’s girlfriend run for the hills” mode. Movie Carlisle greenlit the Cullens all making her a meal instead. This is veering into my hating on the movies again, but you see how this is a different decision that in turn points to different characterization.

Movie Carlisle then calls Rosalie a “nice kitty” and I can only take that as a homage to his backstory in the book because the only explanation for that line is that he is on some level still suicidal. “Nice kitty” is what he says, but what he really means is “kill me”.

The James debacle unfolds, and Rosalie demands to know why they’re all risking their lives for this random human. Movie Carlisle shuts her down, there’s not even a discussion. In Twilight (To cut the movie some modicum of slack I’m not using Midnight Sun (much), since Meyer hadn’t written it yet at the time of the movie being made), their interaction is off-screen and I’ll admit that Rosalie is glaring at Carlisle when Bella reenters the room, but going by his M.O. when it comes to settling differences (giving Bella an explanation as to why Edward won’t turn her, using reason to talk Rosalie out of hurting Bella after the truck accident, throwing every argument he can think of at the wall in the hopes something will stick early in Midnight Sun when he wants Edward to leave Forks, being the person Alice sends Jasper to when Jasper needs to be talked out of doing something rash) it would be out of character for him to just shut her down the way he did in the movies.

Lastly, we have his “REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE” moment when Edward is trying and failing to fight James, which was just bizarre.

The worst failing of this movie’s Carlisle, though, was that his backstory was cut. Now, it was a myopic story centered on Bella, so her human life versus the vampire world were a big focal point in it. We were treated to the full small town routine, with the Cullens as a giant juxtaposition to all of this. The point was the new world Bella was entering and the beautiful boy who opened the door, not the Cullens. It doesn’t seem to have been a movie that expected to have sequels and become a franchise, either, it acted very much like an indie one-off. Even so I posit that Carlisle’s backstory should have been included. The movie didn’t do the whole “mundane vs. fantastical world” thing very well, for one thing. The Cullens acted human, looked human, their house looked like a regular house, and their baseball was sped up at times but otherwise human.

And so, when the Cullens’ characters and lifestyle is never explained, they’re just vampires who live exactly like humans because they jive like that, the end result is that… well, they’re human. Bella isn’t entering a new world at all, she’s just dating a weird kid whose anemic family all follow a special diet.

On to New Moon.

He’s barely in this one, literally this time and not just figuratively, but he gets to be butchered all the same.

We learn he was in Volterra… sort of. There’s a flashback of the Volturi and Facinelli is in it. His part consists of him looking miserable and wishing he was somewhere, anywhere, else. The movie never explains what he was doing there. Edward’s narration says nothing to explain, and then later in the movie Aro (whom book fans will remember reminisced fondly about Carlisle) makes no mention of him. One wonders why Facinelli was in that flashback at all, his presence in it served no purpose. (One wonders the same about the flashback itself. What did it add to the movie?)

I’ve explained in this post how the movie flipped his religion and view on eternal damnation upside-down. Book Carlisle believes he has a soul, movie Carlisle doesn’t. Book and movie Carlisle are not the same person.

Then we get the vote scene, where Carlisle rather effectively ignores Bella. Now, he did address Edward first when he gave his vote in the book too, so that’s technically being true to the original, but book Carlisle then turns to Bella. It’s just so dismissive in the movies, the feminist in me gets all uppity. And, when combined with all the other things, little and small - then yes, I’m putting that little moment on my list of “ugh, movie Carlisle” things.

Eclipse. Oh boy oh dear, oh Eclipse.

Carlisle has a litany of shortcomings. These are brought on by the movie itself being terrible, he’s only a symptom of the disease, but all the same he’s a damning symptom that truly shows how ill the patient is.

In no particular order:

He worries that if the newborn army keeps wreaking chaos in Seattle, the Volturi are going to get involved. Wouldn’t want that.

Book!Carlisle very much wanted the Volturi to step in and do their damn jobs.

He never calls Tanya for backup, so we lose book!Carlisle’s refusal to let the Denali harm the Quileutes at the cost of his own family's safety.

When Jacob is injured after the werewolf attack, he is Mr. In Control of the Situation, offering his savvy medical opinion on Jacob’s condition. Book!Carlisle stared at this injured horse-sized supernatural wolf, stared some more, weakly joked “I’m not a veterinarian”, and went for the trial and error approach. Movie!Carlisle later talks about how Jacob will burn through his morphin, which- how would he know that? He acts so authoritative about things he has no way of knowing, his book counterpart did not.

When the Volturi arrive he's stand-offish to Jane, another characterization choice that diverges from his book self.

Breaking Dawn part 1.

He was barely in the movie. My only recollection of him is of me jumping in my seat at the horrific makeup and wig, and then him performing some examination on Bella.

Book!Carlisle had two moments in particular that come to mind during Bella’s pregnancy, and they are his assurance to Jacob that he won’t abort Bella’s fetus against her will, and his refusal to put Jacob and the Clearwaters in a situation where they’d have to fight Sam’s pack. Both very telling of his character and integrity, both lost in the movie adaption.

The fact that the movie cut those scenes is additionally damning if we look at everything else they cut from his character. The decision to make him a one-note set piece is a consistent one.

Breaking Dawn part 2, things start falling apart.

Carlisle of the books having friends from around the world makes sense because he’s very old and has been all around the world. Movie!Carlisle has no past known to the audience, apart from one weird, unexplained and never mentioned again flashback to Volterra three movies ago. Carlisle’s esoteric friends spawn into existence because the plot needs him to have esoteric friends.

Edward thanks Carlisle for this beautiful life Carlisle gave him, and it means nothing because the two have barely interacted in these movies, Carlisle is important to Edward because this scene just now is telling us that he is important to Edward. Carlisle hasn’t shown any conflict or doubts about turning Edward either, he hasn’t received characterization enough for that, so what Edward’s words mean to him is a mystery to me. Please, show me even one scene in this same movie, or even in the entire quintology, that built up to this moment, I’ll be waiting. The exchange is just a cheap shot at pathos.

Carlisle of the book spent much of this storyline fretting over the coming confrontation, and praying with every fibre of his being that there would be a peaceful resolution. I don’t think movie Carlisle ever so much as voices the sentiment.

The confrontation with the Volturi comes around, and hoo boy.

Carlisle is off to a great start by reminding Aro of a friendship that Aro definitely needs to be reminded of, because per the movies it never happened. He then kills any hope of association with book!Carlisle when he decides to start the fight. Book Carlisle quadrupled down on pacifism, movie Carlisle rushes into glorious battle to kill Aro himself.

In summation, Carlisle is unrecognizable in the movies. Every little thing that made him who he was in the books has been lost or flanderized, with no in between. What’s left is a golem who- well, he doesn’t walk, talk, and act like Carlisle, but he insists he’s Carlisle anyway.

Movie Carlisle is one of the many reasons why I don’t take these movies seriously or consider them canon, or even canon adjacent.

(Post edited on the 18th of October for clarifications. A few paragraphs bothered me.)

#long post #carlisle cullen #twilight #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #twilight movies #books vs. movies #edit: added a link #and a clarifying sentence

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kagesdumpsterfire · 3 years

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Listen, I'm not mad as a shipper, I'm used to having shipping questions shut down at cons at this point. It's been like that for years. I explained as much in an earlier post.

I'm mad as a queer person.

I don't hate Jared. I reserve hate for people I know and people I know for a fact are vile little piss ants. I wouldn't even go so far as to call myself an anti. Up until recently I was more of a neutral. Because you see, I watched the show long before I joined the fandom. I was in the fandom a while before I became a shipper. I was a fan of all the actors before joining the fandom. Followed all of them. Then, Jared started posting about service workers. I stopped following him after that. Just another privileged person complaining. I didn't hate him, just lost a little respect. I found out about the PSH tweet (made about a month before I joined the fandom) a little while later and lost more. Because addiction is a disease, not a choice and what he said (hours after the man's death) was disrespectful as hell. The things he has said and done since the finale have slid me firmly into "not a huge fan, but whatever" territory. His answer on the Destiel queston, that btw, was not asked of him, has me sitting in "don't really like your personality bro, thanks for the character you gave and all, but...yikes. No thanks."

Why? Is it because I'm a "bitter Heller who is just throwing a fit because my ship wasn't validated"? Naw, dude. Like I said, I'm used to disappointment. I've been a Doctor Who fan since 2006. I'm a queer who grew up with Harry Potter, the books, not the movies. I was excited for the first Sucide Squad movie. Disappointment and I are old friends.

It's because Jared sat there, on a stage, infront of a bunch of people, and equated romantic love to sex. He answered a question, (again that he had no reason to because it didn't involve him) that had nothing to do with sex, at all, and made it about sex. He sexulized LGBTQ+ community, like thats not one of the biggest stereotypes we have to defend against Every. Single. Day. I'm the B in that category, and the amount of times people have taken advantage of that...the amount of times I've been called a "whore"... the amount of times someone has assumed I will sleep with anybody just because I'm not picky about what is between someone's legs....it's exhausting. I've been in a monogamous relationship since 2012 and people still assume I'm loose. Also, the fact that people wouldn't consider it cheating if I slept with a woman...disgusting. And thats just me. Don't get me started on the fetishization of the queer community. A super hetero dude bro has no problem watching p*rn with two girls going at it, but god forbid they hold hands, or buy a house and adopt a kid. It's "funny" for a dude to act like a girl but the second that dude kisses another dude it's gross. Just, ugh.

Literally no one said romantic love is about sex. Literally no one said saying "I love you" means "lets fuck". Jared did. He brought his children into it. A mother, speaking about her queer children, asked when Dean found out Castiel's love was romantic and Jared replied with "saying I love you to my son doesn't mean I want to touch him." Dude, NO ONE SAID THAT! He said Castiel couldn't feel romantic love because he was junkless. Again Love is not equal to sex. Castiel had sex with April (which btw, means he wasn't junkless) doesn't mean he loved her. Castiel said he loves Jack. We know that doesn't mean he's trying to do him cuz...ew...that's his son. Again, nobody said sex equals love. But he did.

He sat there and said "LGBTQIA" and completely invalidated the "A" part of it. There is a whole spectrum of people who have no sexual feelings and still feel romantic love. There is a spectrum of people who don't even feel sexual feelings until they feel romantic love. There is a whole spectrum of people who do not eqaute love to sex AT ALL. There are nonbinary folks that feel sexual attraction without regards to gender and there are those who just straight up don't feel sexual attraction at all, but still feel love. And that man sat there and, with his whole chest, made a question about another character's love, about sex.

He brought i*cest into it. No one else did. No one said the show was about love and sex. He brought it up. No one said love couldn't be platonic, he's the one who went off on a tangent about it and AGAIN, on a question (say it with me this time) that WAS NOT FOR HIM! I'm not saying the man doesn't have a say in a show that he was on for 15 years, but Jared and Sam had no involvement in that scene at all. It was not about him. He had no place to answer that question and the way he did was....not good at all.

Now, dont get me wrong, Jensen has no place to speak on Castiel's behalf either. He absolutely has the right to talk about Dean, how Dean interpreted it, and how he played Dean's reaction, because Dean is his character. Castiel is Misha's. Misha doesn't speak on Dean's feelings as if he knows because it isn't his place to say. Jensen should do the same. And the thing is, he was actually doing a decent job answering it, until Jared interrupted. He was interrupted and backed into a corner of a PR nightmare, and backpedaled. That's it.

Like I said, not suprised it was tiptoed around. The show isn't about shipping, I get it. Being angry about it solves nothing. It will just make me bitter.

I am pissed that Jared went on a long rant about things he has no business speaking about. I am pissed that Jared invalidated an entire spectrum of people. If you are queer and have no problem with what he said, that's on you, but I, and I know many others, are not okay with it. He made a question into something it wasn't and I'm allowed to be mad about it for reasons that aren't about my ship.

I think I'm done for now, but who knows. Either way I hope everyone has a good day today.

You are loved, you are worthy and you are VALID!

That is all.

#dencon2021 #destiel question #anti jared #never thought id have to use that tag #being queer isn't about sex #love is not about sex #no one said it but you #big oof dude

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ocw-archive · 2 years

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New York Times, Men's Fashion of the Times; March 2004

Piazzaman

By Josh Patner

''Could I have some more ah-gua, per fah-for-eh?'' Owen Wilson asks the waitress in a restaurant just off Piazza di Spagna in Rome. His Italian is 100 percent Texas tourist; you almost hear President Bush speaking Spanish. ''I don't know why they can't make the Italian food at home taste like here,'' Wilson says, eyeballing a piece of tuna in his salad. ''Go into any dive, and it's the best Italian food you ever had.''

As the wonder rises in his flat, twangy voice, it's hard to imagine anything more charmingly American than Owen Wilson in Rome. He flops down at a cafe table with all the formality of a guy about to pop open a Bud. Certainly the shaggy blond hair, baseball cap and blue jeans do their part. Or maybe it's because he's bowlegged: he always looks as if he has just jumped off a horse. ''Can you imagine how I felt, coming here from Dallas?'' says Wilson, 35. ''I mean, it's so beautiful!'' The actor, who co-stars in ''Starsky & Hutch'' opposite Ben Stiller, has been in Rome for the last five months working on ''The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.'' Directed by his best friend and college roommate, Wes Anderson, it tells of a father-son conflict between Bill Murray's Jacques Cousteau-like man of the sea and Wilson's airplane pilot. When Wilson talks of living among the wonders of Rome, he speaks elliptically, stymied, like a suburban guy who has landed on a dazzling new planet. ''After being in Rome, flying into Dallas/Fort Worth and driving by the Dairy Queens and the 7-Elevens . . . it's sort of . . . Europeans must find . . . here they are with all this beauty . . . the churches with the Caravaggio paintings . . . it's so . . . different.''

Movie stars in Rome have long enjoyed the affections of a city that loves celebrity. But Wilson reverses that equation: he has thrown his arms open to Rome. ''It's not like I'm Bruce Willis,'' he says with a sheepish grin. ''He probably has a hard time going outside.'' But Wilson is everywhere: watching American football at an Irish pub near Piazza Navona, buying cheese at an outdoor market, zooming past the Vespas on his bicycle. ''I tear around Piazza del Popolo and then go down to the Colosseum, and I ride around that, and then I hit that place -- what is it? The Circus Maximus.'' You might think Wilson -- the handsome brother of the handsome actors Luke and Andrew, and Sheryl Crow's ex -- was on his junior year abroad.

But Wilson is no wide-eyed hick. Writers have called him a ''big-popcorn movie star'' and ''bankable headliner.'' He is an actor who has it all: down-home folksiness and art-house weight, megaplex sex appeal and a deep sense of complex characters. His peculiarly deadpan delivery (he sounds like an old-time character actor playing a boozy cowboy) and versatile presence on screen (he can be ironic and naïve) have made for a charmed career. ''Bottle Rocket,'' his first film, a crime caper written with Anderson, who also directed, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. ''It's kind of incredible,'' he says, a toothpick twirling in his teeth. ''Wes and I were friends in school; we'd go see two movies a night. Wes worked in the projection booth, so we went for free. And here we are at Cinecittà, where Scorsese filmed. It's good, man.'' The two continued to work together on scripts for ''Rushmore'' and ''The Royal Tenenbaums,'' which received an Oscar nomination for best screenplay in 2001.

Wilson's first major roles, in ''Shanghai Noon'' and ''Zoolander,'' showed his finesse with action and comedy. In ''Behind Enemy Lines,'' his portrayal of a military pilot shot down in Bosnia and on the run revealed an equal gift for drama. Now, with his character in ''The Life Aquatic,'' he has another chance to broaden the goofy screen persona that isn't far from his real self. ''This character is a lot less of me. He's very innocent and sweet-natured. A lot of characters I've played are rife with insecurities. But he seems happy.''

With three new films in the works, he could be dizzier than a rodeo pony. (He has roles as a villain in ''The Wendell Baker Story,'' written with Luke, who co-stars and co-directs with Andrew, and a romantic lead in ''Wedding Crashers.'') But as our lunch ends, he kicks back with one foot on a stool and talks of leaving Rome. ''I think the thing I'll miss most is the feeling I have here -- feeling really relaxed and just kinda riding around on my bike, seeing stuff.'' After a polite ''Thank you, and see yuh,'' he zooms off on his bicycle, so deeply American that the grandeur of Rome seems to shrivel in his wake. You imagine for a moment that you are on some college quad, not before a palazzo made of stones dragged from the Colosseum.

Ah-ree-ve-der-chi, man.

#2004 #photoshoot #interview

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undercat-overdog · 3 years

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For @tolkienocweek, family members day. Ah, the nameless textual ghosts.

Anyways, the Mrs. Feanorians in my head!

Maglor’s wife, for whom I use the name Lissilóte, meaning “sweet-flower.” It is not a name of foresight. It may be a name of anti-foresight. She’s Noldorin and more than a bit of a diva, though she’s not a musician or actor, but instead a professional debater of a rather flamboyant school of rhetoric. (What, of course the Noldor have debates as entertainment!) She stays in Aman, somewhat to her surprise. Lissilóte is someone who both by nature and profession argues the opposite of whatever the dominant argument is, so she’s on the pro-stay side, though she doesn’t actually care about it. After Maglor leaves she's like "... it wasn't supposed to go that way." But she's stuck and then is mostly a thorn in everyone's side for the next few centuries: she is, unfortunately, a member of the house of Finwe by marriage (and temperament, honestly, and since it was the more drama-free ones who stayed the Finweans have to have someone who can fulfill the argument quota) so they're stuck with her too.

Caranthir’s spouse... eh. Not Haleth, she seems uninterested to me and that’s a general dynamic I don’t ship (especially in m/f when the uninterested character is a woman), but other than that no particular headcanons. An elf, definitely not a named character. Maybe one of the Laegrim?

Curufin’s wife! Under the cut, because I have a lot to say about her.

I gave Mrs. Curufin the name Súlind (also Súlin, especially after the First Age). ‘Wind-mind/heart” in Sindarin, but I went with it mostly for the sound - it feels Tolkien-ish to me, a name I could see him using. She and her family are Teler - not Teleri, but the Telerrim, Círdan’s people, more commonly known as the Falathrim (a nod to the Telperimpar version, and I like it too). Súlind was born after the Sindar had settled down in Beleriand and the cities of the Falas had been founded. Her father, and I need to find a name for him, is a fisherman/marine biology (I tend to think a lot of Elven occupations were blended together like that - someone who likes studying sea creatures can catch them to eat too), her mother Laerlin is of unknown occupation, and she has a younger brother named Borophor, “steadfast-fist,” whom Celebrimbor is partly named after. Súlind may or may not have an older sister - I haven’t decided but I’ve been playing around with maybe Súlind having nephews-or-nieces/Celebrimbor having cousins who are killed at Sirion. All the family dies, of course: Boropher in the Bragollach, Laerlin in the sack of the Falas post-Nirnaeth, and the father in a tsunami during the War of Wrath (there had to have been some friendly fire). Súlind lives.

She herself is something of a Renaissance Elf, and one generally more interested in theory than craft (an astronomer, a mathematician, a poet), though an excellent glasswright. Súlind and a couple others came up with the idea of computers: not computers like we have, but a bunch of people sitting around manually working equations so that complex modeling is possible. She met Curufin after the siege of the Falas was lifted right after the Feanorians arrived and they kept in touch for the next couple decades till they married. Súlind is a bit of a strange person, not entirely connected to the world, and fits in quite well with Curufin. She is not shy about disagreeing with Noldorin superiority and his love and respect for her causes Curufin to rethink a lot of that, and is one of the reasons why he’s able to get along with the Dwarves so well later. Her reaction to Alqualonde is matter of fact and she doesn’t much care (it was the logical thing to do, right?) but will absolutely bring it up in arguments.

Speaking of arguing, she is quite capable of it and shares the general style with Curufin and Celebrimbor, all of whom go for the throat in serious ones, and like her husband and son, Súlind is completely convinced she’s always right. Her arguments with Curufin usually aren’t emotionally fraught, but hers and Celebrimbor’s absolutely can be and their relationship can get very difficult at times. (Annatar did not help with that, and Súlind moved to Harlindon in around SA 1300 or so and did not come back till after SA 1600 and spends a lot of time... not blaming herself exactly, Súlind is not someone who blames herself, but emotionally wishing it had been otherwise.)

Speaking of arguments with Curufin, she refuses to leave Nargothrond with him and was completely shocked that he thought she’d go with. The leave-taking is probably acrimonious on Curufin’s part but not at all on Súlind’s (they also have it in private, Súlind not being inclined to Finwean-style public drama). That said, Súlind still fully considers themselves married and herself a member of Curufin’s family - she didn’t renounce her husband, and their parting was probably “not coming with you, I’d like to wish you well but I should probably just wish that you die before you kill more people, love you xoxo.” Privately devastated by Curufin’s death and I’m not entirely sure she ever quite comes to terms with it. If Curufin is reborn, she’ll be quite shocked when he shows up to say sorry and says he’ll leave - she still considers themselves very much married and as long as Curufin’s not planning on trying to kill Lúthien or sacking Doriath, why wouldn’t they be together?

As parents, neither she nor Curufin are particularly great. There is no lack of love and they are quite doting, but generally don’t get that Celebrimbor is a child, not a small adult. Most of the time that works out fine - they are lucky their kid’s a genius and can understand detailed scientific explanations of why the sky is blue - but when it comes to explaining things in an age-appropriate manner or talking about feelings, it’s a good thing Tyelpe has Celegorm and Borophor, both of whom are good uncles (likewise Finrod once they’re in Nargothrond - those three are the only relatives that Celebrimbor considers uncles. Aside from Huan ofc, the bestest uncle). Speaking of Celegorm, he and Súlind get along quite well despite being very different.

Súlind lives. Through the War of the Elves and Sauron (which was devastating for her), the Last Alliance, and the entire Third Age. She split her time between Edhellond and Imladris and became close to Arwen, though less so the twins, who should really appreciate calculus more than they do, the delinquents. That said, she fully understands their five hundred years of orc revenge hunting and there’s some bonding over that. She lives in Minas Tirith as one of Queen Arwen’s companions (I think quite a few Elves stayed for Arwen, at least till she got settled and comfortable - I want Arwen to have some old friends around!), and sails to Aman a few years before Aragorn’s death. She is very tired by then.

In Aman she reunites with her parents and sibling(s) and son, all reborn. Happy reunions, a lot of rest, a long talk with Elrond and Celebrían about Arwen’s life in Gondor, a few decades later some vicious though later patched up arguments with Celebrimbor about welcoming strange Maiar (patched up in the sense of after not speak to each other for a decade they come to a mutual agreement never to talk about it again), and then once she’s feeling up for it, exploring Aman and what it has to offer. I don’t know if she and Lissilóte adore each other or loathe each other. After a few centuries, she may make very reasoned arguments with Mandos about why releasing Curufin is the only logical thing to do.

#tolkienocweek #textual ghosts #mrs curufin #mrs maglor #meta #(?)

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rpmemestorehouse · 3 years

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Monster Island Buddies Starters: Season 3

Change wording as needed

“A long, long time ago, at your fat, fat mom’s house...”

“Ah, the great outdoors. Finally, I can enjoy some peace and quiet, and I can be alone with my thoughts.”

“What the f- what did I do?!”

“Come on, what’re you doing?! Put me down!”

“I’m gonna hunt down every monster responsible for [Name]’s death, one by one.”

“Come on, listen. The leader played us all!”

“Now let’s have a roll call!”

“Thou thus thee! Thou thou, thus!”

“How did he know burning my flesh was my weakness?!”

“I mean, obviously the bad guys keep escaping custody and causing problems, so, doesn’t it just make sense to kill them and end it there?”

“Hulk WEEPS for fallen foes!”

“Can I still use the team’s dental plan?”

“I got a cameraaa!”

“Tell us about your new movie!”

“Nyeah, look boss! The kid’s taping us!”

“[Name], finish with the transdimensional portal. And put a shirt on!”

“Wait, hold on I can do this.”

“Please, Master! Save me! Why are you just standing there watching?!”

“Hehehe, Turtle Power!”

“We’re ninjas! This is what we do!”

“You’re holding a sword! Drive it through his heart!”

“*whispering* Dude, he’s fucked up.”

“[Name], listen. What happened to [Name] isn’t your fault.”

“...must...keep...going...”

“That hurts even though I’m metal!”

“Hello. My name is [Name]. You killed my friend. Prepare to die.”

“I come from a planet behind Jupiter.”

“Ah, you must be the great [Name].”

“I know everything. I know that you seek revenge.”

“I want what you want: revenge for an unjust death.”

“Hooooly SHIT, Batman!”

“I’m just gonna drink until I die.”

“Alright alright alright! We don’t have to watch that again!”

“[Name] why you talkin’ like that? That ain’t your motherfuckin’ voice.”

“I’m just in-character. I’m a professional actor, see?”

“What’s the matter? Afraid I’ll win another fight against you?”

“...You know as well as I do that our fight was a tie.”

“Aaah shit, I smell a rematch y’all.”

“Yeah, here’s your rematch.”

“Trick-or-treat, smell my ass, give me candy!”

“Whatever you do, don’t go the old mansion on Elm Street. It’s haunted by nutcrackers, you know!”

“*incomprehensible, possessed babbling*

“I played a priest once on a daytime soap opera!”

“I vant to suck your nuts!”

“Aah, Frankenstein, we meet again.”

“Even in the afterlife, I want you dead!”

“...Thanks for taking one for the team, man.”

“Don’t you ever fucking talk to me again.”

“It’s HAMLET! Read a book!”

“Isn’t it FUN doing group activities TOGETHER?!”

“We’ve found you at last!”

“Now you guys chase US!”

“FIRE POWERRR!!!”

“There’s no need for things to ever get awkward!”

“Now I’m in the past again!”

“Looks like you’re in quite the pickle, old sport!”

“Why are you always breaking in and stealing my sock?!”

“What? How did you find me?!”

“We finally got you! What do you have to say for yourself?!”

“...Fuck you.”

“Think I threw out my back on that one.”

“You and I now share a bond. You should stay with me.

“My place is with my friends.”

“Oh, hey [Nickname]. [Name]’s helping me do my taxes.”

“Yeah, apparently everyone wants me dead.”

“You idiots. Guns can’t hur- OOWWW!!!”

“Jesus [Name]! How do you manage to piss everyone off all the time?!”

“You owe the IRS 317 dollars″.

“Complete this scientific equation: E=mc...”

“HAMMER!”

“Raymond Burr was spliced into this Japanese movie for it’s American release...”

“Weren’t you supposed to be with [Name]?”

“I’ll stick my hand up your butt and pull you inside out! I’m gettin’ better at it! I’ve had practice!”

“I’m more powerful than you now!”

“I’m fine! Just a little tummy ache!”

#ask meme #ask starter #sentence meme #sentence starter #original memes #source: youtube #inbox meme #inbox starters #rp meme #rp starter #rp prompts #Author's note: yeah i kno it's july yet this has some halloween-themed prompts; i celebrate that sht year round

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harpersplay · 3 years

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4x10 and 4x11 Thoughts

Doing the bare minimum after being a parent for 13 years is not impressive. And I can't believe they are trying to equate doing that with Beth's years as an involved & active SAHM. (Gasp! Dare I defend Beth? Will I get my hater mantle taken away? I've said over & over that Beth's character has suffered the most from the shit writing. I truly have no idea how Beth stans think the show is good when every season Beth—as a character—gets worse & worse. And often because she is written at the expense of male characters.) And he's not a good dad. He's still fun dad (and also gross Dad. Who the fuck puts syrup on pancakes until right before you eat them?!?!?!). Giving his young children containers of Oreos (and encouraging them to lie to their mother) and risking their stability by again making shitty financial/business choices. Oh, and good dad (and good mom) are preparing to flee from prosecution and—I guess—just live on the run forever. Super great childhoods they're planning for their kids.

I was not at all clamoring for a Dean & Rio scene. Like ever. Luckily, it wasn't that bad. There was no swordfighting over Beth. And Dean got to see how Beth interacts with Rio (she talks to him with that haughty annoyed tone) which helps him to finally realize (JUST LIKE BETH TOLD HIM IN 1x6!) that Beth does this because she wants to not because the evil moose forces her.

Dorothy built her own store and career and none of the girls give a millisecond of thought to stealing the press. And that's after they've spent months using her store for illegal activities. Oh, and the obvious culprit when (if? because who knows with this show) Dorothy calls the police is going to be the former employee with multiple brushes with the law. But, great plan.

And, ugh, of course the girls are shocked that Diane & friends expect to be paid. They've only been doing this for years. Why would they learn anything? BTW, don't think I missed Beth mocking Krystal's voice. Where all the anti-misogynists at?

Breckin Meyer plays a really good creep. And someone actually did some research; because creeps make connections by being super tactile. I hate this MRA/MLM story. Why does it exist? Why is Vance at Dean's meeting with the lawyer? Is there some sort of budding cult leader/acolyte confidentiality?

So Stan is now getting directly supplied by the purse connect. Presumably the "Woman in Room 216." But why would she work with them? Weeks after she gets involved with Gene, he gets busted and spilled everything. So why would anyone in the criminal world work with Stan who was seen out & about as Gene's right hand? Why does Stan have access to the strip club? What about the "he" that owns the club that Gene mentioned? We know the city seized it and is going to auction it, but they don't just let people come in & out in the meantime; especially when it was a place used for illegal activity. Why does the show think this is unimportant to address but Dean montages are needed?

Ruby is all the way fucked up in this whole stupid Beth vs Stan nonsense (Reason #763 why she needs Black friends and it's super sus that she doesn't have any). She wasn't being neutral AT ALL and she was more on Beth's side for no reason than fake drama. Stan is probably the character we've seen undergo the most on a spiritual/moral/existential level. Ruby started at a similar place from him, but she at least went in knowing she was doing whatever she had to for Sara. Stan didn't find things out until the Hills were already in it. He's had multiple conversations with Ruby about what all this has done to him. He's calibrated his worldview of right & wrong. And for Ruby to tell him to "take the high road" was a slap in the face. Beth told Ruby she lied to Stan and Ruby was still on her side. Also, Stan was totally justified in what he said to Beth but the show is going to align him with Dean to neutralise the truth of his words. (I mean, the fact that he's a Black man has already been enough for people to say he's being "mean" to Beth.) And Beth yelling at Ruby to not defend Stan? No. Nope. That white woman needs to mind her own house.

The Kevin storyline is stupid & gross. First they used him to portray Annie's rock bottom. I don't know, having sex with your married ex while his wife is pregnant is more rock bottom to me. As is trying to fuck with your therapist's fiancée for funsies. And then he knows stuff about lacrosse, so suddenly he has some worth. Not because he's a human being. It's all incredibly offensive. But to have Annie, who has seen firsthand the problem with food waste and has been shown to have zero issues with Ben's transition (Not that she should have any. Just that it is a very, very common narrative for parents who will say they love their children to still express concern about how difficult life will be for them. And then they have some learning moment and credits.), be this judgmental character? It's plot > character again. And Annie has to start having feelings for him. Because, of course.

Ugh the casino. Just like the strip club fake bachelorette party, the writers just had an idea for a "fun" scene and did it regardless of how stupid. See the girls are always unlucky except in this moment when they need to be. Isn't that the most clever thing ever? Casinos monitor everything (Ruby actually points this out, which makes it worse) and the girls were acting completely suspicious. They would have for sure drawn attention. And then we have the added stupidity of the timeline being fucked with again to make a "clever" line work. Moments/twists/scene > plot > character. Always. The background actors in the scene were really earning their checks, tho.

Beth & Nick planting a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

#nbc good girls #good girls nbc #good girls season 4

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woodchoc-magnum · 3 years

Text

L0ne St@r 2x12 Hate Watch

DO NOT REBLOG THIS ONE - thanks, I’m trying to fly under the radar with my negative opinions here

Usual disclaimer, and I mean it this time: If you watch and love this show, that’s great and I hope you continue to enjoy it. Please don’t read this - simply go about having a lovely day.

If you do love this show and T*rlos and are braving this anyway - do not come in here. I mean it. This is not a T*rlos friendly zone. I do not ship it. Please enjoy your ship in peace and harmony. I have no intention of getting into arguments with anyone, I will simply ignore you.

I have done everything I can to avoid this showing up in the tags, whatever the LS tags are. Don’t send me hate on anon because I’ll delete them; I don’t care if you think I should stop watching the show, I’m not gonna. I like to suffer.

Eddie Diaz for calm and strength and to centre ourselves:

Hate, as always, under the cut:

Let's do this fucking thing, I've heard bad things about this episode

And I already know I'm wrong about the arsonist which is ANNOYING but maybe also too obvious so that's okay, I also know who the arsonist is and all the main plot points but I’ve still got to watch it to really appreciate the subtle nuances of the episode:

Oooh Billy

I ship it

Billwen for the win

This show is so dumb

Billy is smarter than Owen, maybe he should be the captain of the 126

I miss his lightning scars though

He's TWO HOURS LATER FOR DINNER

TK is looking as bland as always

They seriously waited for two fucking hours for this guy

Maybe should've put some deodorant on before going to dinner there Owen

You know I can't imagine the OG doing a storyline as dumb as this

So Carlos' dad thinks it's someone who works at the 126 or just a firefighter in general?

Well gosh darn it, it looks like Owen fits that profile exactly!

At least we get some Judd early in the episode and I love him

Angela Bassett is executive producer on this show as well? I hope she gets paid cash money for this

Billy is the red herring and I fell right into their trap

I just really wanted it to be him

Ooh Grace was listening

Oh it's 100% the arson investigator and Billy is 100% turning Owen in, I love him

Billy is amazing

He's my favourite character on this show

I hope he's not working with Owen to get the arson investigator? I hope he's actually this devious

I want him to be THIS DEVIOUS

Why the fuck does Owen wear that hoodie everywhere

TK is now having a little bitch fit

"they can't do that, can they?" he asks in a monotone, his face blank and devoid of expression

TK's real real dumb

Oh ho ho is this the shoving scene

IT IS

God Ronen CANNOT ACT

Okay so while I think it is wildly unbelievable that they would send TK's boyfriend to tell him that his father had been arrested by HIS father – it seems like a conflict – I would like to say that Carlos is being calm and reasonable

And TK is acting like a little BITCH

This is escalating quickly

Oh TK you so dumb

THE SHOVING

Wow

FOUR TIMES

Wow

Your fave is problematic, yo

Carlos deserves better than this whiny little piece of shit

And now, an interlude while I rant:

Let's talk about how Eddie Diaz yelled at Buck once in a supermarket and the fandom has never forgotten it; how his character has been villainised despite everything else going on in the show at the time, for that one fucking scene – let's talk about all the fics where Eddie hits Buck, or punches him, or rapes him – because you know those fics exist – let's talk about the "Eddie is violent" narrative that parts of this fandom like to push because Eddie yelled at Buck, one time, once, in a supermarket

Totally ignoring the fact that at no point at all, in any other episode he’s been in, has he been violent towards Buck, at all - let’s talk about how the street fighting arc was out of character for Eddie, because he was struggling to cope and looking for an outlet - let’s talk about how Buck and Eddie moved past that whole storyline and strengthened their relationship; how they built a family together, how they’re a team and they have each other’s backs no matter what, and how, not once in the entire show, have they ever been violent towards each other or pushed each other around in anger - NOT ONCE.

And let's talk about this scene, where TK, ya boy, ya sweet tender boy, just shoved the man he says he loved four times, violently, in front of people at the firehouse.

I betcha any money he doesn’t get tarnished with the Eddie-Diaz-is-violent brush, because he can do no wrong. He’s the fan favourite, and this is totally glossed over by the end of the episode and nothing will ever be said about it ever again.

Because wow, you guys. Wow. If this was my ship, I’d be pissed.

Back to the hate watch:

And I know that whole fight is for nothing because I know the plot twist – I know that the dads are working together in order to reveal the real arsonist, the investigator – so they've basically turned their children, who are in a relationship, against each other?

Also why is Billy allowed to be watching the interview?

Goddamn do we really have to show the gruesome burn victim photos

I really want Billy to be devious by the way, and not in on the plan

Oh here comes TK, looking like the little bitch he is

God he's a fucking awful actor

This is the dumbest plotline ever

Equating OWEN STRAND WITH THOR? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

BLASPHEMY

THOR IS THE GOD OF THUNDER

OWEN IS A DUMBASS

THE TWO ARE NOT EQUAL

Uh oh here comes the evil investigator

Do either of these men – Owen and Carlos' dad – stop to consider that what they're doing has kind of an impact on their children, who are currently in a relationship? No? Okay

Because this is one hell of an awkward situation

Does Owen genuinely think that Billy is the arsonist?

Interesting that the arson investigator wants any info Owen didn't give Carlos' dad, and he turned off the cameras/mics etc

This show is stupid

Arson investigator also knows that the sons are dating, interesting

"And you can pound sand!" oooh great comeback Owen

This episode is so BORING OMG

Why the fuck am I watching a shitty Law & Order knock-off when I should be watching a bonkers 911 episode

Oh no Judd's at Billy's

I really do think Billy Burke is good looking and it is a flaw of mine, I don't know what it is about him and he really doesn't look that good in this show but I really love Billy Burke okay

And I WANT HIM TO BE DEVIOUS

Oh Judd

Oh Judd thinks Billy is the arsonist

See this is why YOU DON'T LIE TO THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU

Oh he punched him

God damn everyone is violent in this show

Judddddddddddddd

Uh oh here comes trouble to the "vagrant's" hospital room

Oh it's the arson investigator, their little bluff worked, incredible, amazing, flawless etc

Wow how amazing

It was the ol' switcheroo

Judd punched Billy for nothing

TK and Carlos nearly came to blows for nothing

Now Owen is allowed to watch the interrogation? They'll just let anyone watch those things these days

OH MAN ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT BILLY WAS IN ON IT WITH OWEN THE WHOLE TIME?

Damn it I wanted DEVIOUS god damn it

Fucking cowards

"I assumed it was probably a trap at the hospital which is why I went there anywhere"

But why is he lighting fires

A FEW MONTHS?

A man is dead

Pure theatre

So annoyed that Billy isn't devious

But the Billwen ship sails on, clowns 🤡

Do we think the arsonist has the hots for Owen? 100% yes, right?

He's very happy to see him wink wonk

This doesn't even feel like an episode of 911, it's so goddamn dumb

"I knew you had darkness in you too" – that dude definitely wants to fuck him

Why is he lighting the fires?

They're so dumb

"And now I'm going to repay the favour" – he's talking about YOUR SONS

WHO HE KNOWS ARE TOGETHER

Wow these two dumbasses really have no fucking idea do they

OH HE'S BURNING HIMSELF ALIVE

Wow this is graphic

What the fuck is up with this show and the horribly graphic scenes lately?

That dude is dead yo

"Take away everything that's important to me" AND HE CALLS THE FIREHOUSE FIRST

THE FIREHOUSE IS THE FIRST FUCKING CALL???

Oh okay it did blow up and TK was there so I'll allow it

But hey look on the bright side – Owen gets to remodel again!

And isn't that what he's the best at?

Yo your firehouse is on fire dudes, better call the fire department

Does Judd apologise to Billy or no

Oh here we have TK and Carlos and their perfect love

And Carlos is the one apologising?

No.

Please tell me no

Carlos you are allowed to be pissed at him – ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

"nobody has to apologise?"

YOUR BOYFRIEND PUSHED YOU AROUND

Oh my god

Wow

Okay.

Look I'm just saying that to me this would be a GIGANTIC RED FLAG but wtf do I know

I'm just saying because I have to – if Carlos was a woman and TK did that? Whole different story gang

Whole completely different mother-fucking story

This show, wow

Wow.

Wow. This is bad.

Domestic violence happens to men too, just saying.

Wow I'm so annoyed that I've paused it to type furiously and rant that wow, they're just not acknowledging that TK was totally out of line? Okay. Wow.

And everyone's just fine with it?

Oh they're just figuring out that he set more than one fire

Maybe there's something else you care about other than the firehouse, Owen

Maybe?

BILLY IS THE ONE WHO FIGURES IT OUT

See this is why Billy is the best

Oh no TK and Carlos are in danger

Oh it's so romantic isn't it? They're gonna fuck now that everything is okay

Wow he left a lot of bombs in Carlos' house

Damn Carlos is hot

No smoke alarms?

That fire has really taken ahold there guys

I'm gonna assume you do have smoke alarms and he disconnected them

Wow he really covered all bases didn't he

Put the bombs in the bedroom as well

RIP Carlos' nice house

"I love you too" after I violently shoved you around today

Oh who needs a fucking fire department when you've got Owen fucking Strand right?

"Carlos" he says flatly. "How are you doing?" he asks in a monotone

"I should've had an extinguisher in the bedroom" DUDE NO ONE DOES

And if TK wanted one in there, he's the fucking firefighter, he should've checked when he moved in instead of assuming like a dumbass

God this show is dumb as fuck and I hate it so much

Billwen for the win

"just a couple of crap magnets" fucking a-men Judd

This show sucks

Oh no TOMMY OH NO

WHAT'S HAPPENING

OH MY GOD

WHAT THE FUCK

What the fuck

Is he dead?

TAKE OWEN AND TK INSTEAD

I’m going to say one more thing about this T*rlos storyline - if they’d done this to Buck & Eddie in the OG, I’d be fucking devastated. Like... if Buck or Eddie pushed the other around the way TK pushed Carlos around, I’d be absolutely gutted. It’s really horrible that they went down that path - whether it’s OOC or not, and you can probably argue that it is - they shouldn’t have included the scene like that in the show.

It just raises a whole slew of questions, like... is TK violent? Is Carlos used to being pushed around in relationships? Is the show saying that it’s okay that they got a little physical because they’re both men? Domestic violence is never okay, and this is kind of... saying that it is, in certain circumstances?

That is problematic as fuck and such bad writing.

These two are in a relationship where they are living together and supposedly love each other, and this is how the writers choose to portray it? If you’re a T*rlos shipper and you’re upset about this episode, I get it. It’s really fucking terrible that they included that scene - and I would bet cold hard cash it’ll never be addressed again.

This is why LS is a bad show. It’s shitty writing. Shitty storylines. Characters who are interesting are shoved into the background and glossed over in favour of the male white characters. The OG doesn’t have this problem - for everyone complaining that Eddie hasn’t been featured as much this season (and yeah, I hate it too) - you can’t complain that the characters of colour don’t get equal screentime.

With LS - it’s the Rob Lowe show, and everyone else is just in the background. And that’s why it’s so frustrating to watch - they have a great cast, and this could be a really good show, but it’s just not.

Do you think the LS writers patted themselves on the back after this arc and were like, "yeah we nailed it, we're amazing?"

This episode is -1,000000/10. This show should be cancelled.

Two god awful miserable fucking episodes to go.

Diaz to cleanse:

#DO NOT REBLOG #lone star hate watch #enter at your own risk

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denimbex1986 · 3 months

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'The newest queer movie to have turned the internet upside down has finally been released in the UK, leaving those who see it in floods of tears at screenings around the country. The question is: do tears equate to quality?

All of Us Strangers follows Andrew Scott’s Adam as he attempts to write a screenplay about his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell), drawing him to his childhood home where his parents appear to be living just as they were on the day they died 30 years ago. All the while, Adam begins a relationship with his mysterious neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal, Aftersun).

Andrew Haigh opens by showing us Andrew Scott’s protagonist as he goes about his life; laying on the couch all day, attempting to write a screenplay about his parents, and eating last night’s leftovers. He is completely debilitated by the past and his inability to move on from it. Living in his new block, Adam is surrounded by the vast emptiness of his apartment building, which no one else has moved into. Other than Paul Mescal’s Harry, that is. The pair meet at Adam’s door after spotting each other during a fire drill. Harry has a whiskey bottle in hand and is reeking of desperation. Mescal sways brilliantly between confident and vulnerable, with a genuine charm to him that he plays subtly enough to allow us to see through his plan to get into the apartment. Just as we are somewhat charmed by him, it is clear that Scott’s character is too, hiding smiles here and there whilst being a little intimidated. In a final attempt at gaining company, Harry quotes lyrics to “The Power of Love” he heard through Adam’s walls, claiming “There’s vampires at my door.”

The opening lines to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “The Power of Love” reverberate throughout the film. “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw. Keep the vampires from your door.” The song is essentially the anthem of this story, with the opening lyrics used to evoke love in all of its forms, for better and for worse. Though the song is referenced in this introductory scene to signify the lack of love within Harry’s life and the loneliness that awaits him at home, the lyrics and what they can signify constantly evolve as the film goes on. This illustrates the excellence behind Haigh’s writing and directing. Although this film’s visual language can get a little overbearing at points, his use of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song provides little doubt so far as his talent goes. Using the song early on in the film creates a motif that permeates, constantly changing all the while providing an emotional weight to much of the tale. It’s a stroke of brilliance on Haigh’s part.

Equally, the writer-director takes some fairly difficult material – with its boundary-defying, time-hopping story of love – and makes it easily digestible through its close study of its four characters: Adam, Harry, and Adam’s parents. The close attention paid to the smallest, intimate details of the characters’ relationships not only draws us in on an emotional level, but it also allows us to focus on these characters rather than getting bogged down in any plot detail.

As for those who bring Haigh’s screenplay to life, the performances are simply superb. Particularly, the chemistry between Andrew Scott and his characters’ parents is beautiful, with all three capturing the complicated relationship that can exist between a child and those who raised them; that type of unconditional love that can remain almost unspoken within a family, and all of the repressed emotion and trauma that comes with it. Paul Mescal, even more impressively, continues to prove why he is the greatest actor working today. Never overstepping the spotlight of his co-stars, Mescal takes his handful of moments and brings the house down with the faintest of looks or the most heartbreaking of line deliveries, providing exactly what is needed of his character and then some.

Although each of these individual elements are excellent in their own right, it is when they work in tandem with one another that All of Us Strangers truly exceeds expectations; the music, direction, writing, and acting all elevate each other to heights that many other movies could only dream of. In the process, All of Us Strangers crafts a beautiful story of love, grief, loneliness, and the past, which ensures there isn’t a dry eye in the house come the credits.

With his latest release, Andrew Haigh brings us a devastating new love story that overwhelms with emotion from start to finish and will stick with you for days. Although the acting and directing are excellent, it is the story that many will find themselves fixating on. Bring tissues.

Score: 22/24

⭐⭐⭐⭐'

#Andrew Haigh #All of Us Strangers #Andrew Scott #Paul Mescal #Claire Foy #Jamie Bell #The Power of Love #Frankie Goes to Hollywood #Aftersun

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oscopelabs · 3 years

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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