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oddishblossom · 2 years

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Tag People You Wanna Get to Know Better

Tagged by the wonderful and lovely @lans-rabbit-glade 😊💖! Thanks for tagging me izzy! I loved reading your answers :)

Relationship Status: It’s just me here (single pringle)

Favorite Colors: Pink & Red

Song Stuck in My Head: Do I Wanna Know by Arctic Monkeys… I’ve listened to that song probably a million times and I’m still not tired of it nor will I ever be 💖. I’m definitely not looping it for writing inspiration or anything (also izzy I see your song choice and I am tempted to roast you for being a mobile gamer 😜)

Last Thing You Googled: “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball.” I was looking up song lyrics (I listen to other artists besides arctic monkeys, I swear 😅)

Time: 11:47 PM when I’m writing this. But I usually queue most of my posts so it’ll be 10 AM when I’m posting this :3

Dream Trip: Hmmm, idk. I’m not much of an explorer lol. Maybe Japan or New Zealand? Just to say that I’ve been there before. Honestly, as long as I can go either shopping or to an amusement park I’ll be happy as a clam.

Last Thing You Read: It’s rare, but sometimes I want to read a cute high school AU with a love triangle. So the last thing I read was a tyrus fanfic called Of Course by CaithyCat & imnotanauthor. I’ve been rewatching Andi Mack, an old comfort show of mine. I know it’s a disney show “for kids” but sometimes I just feel like watching disney or nickelodeon shows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also this one in particular I started watching when I was bedridden for a month so it’s very dear to me :)

Last Book You Enjoyed Reading: Believe it or not, I actually read a paperback book last week. I was looking for a quote, so I opened my volume 2 of *cough* Scum Villain’s Self Saving System *cough*. And then I found the quote. And then I just kept reading until I was halfway through volume 3 and it was like 3 in the morning. Seriously, that book makes my brain go a little bonkers. The scene where Shen Qingqiu tries to hide Luo Binghe from Zhuzhi Lang nearly made me cry from laughing too hard.

Last Book You Hated Reading: Excluding fanfics, I can’t think of one… Maybe Tokyo Ghoul/:re back in 2017? I remember really hating that manga. Honestly, I’m really picky when choosing something to read so the stories I end up disliking I tend to just drop them and then completely forget they ever existed.

Favorite Thing to Cook/Bake: I’m kind of a terrible chef ngl. But the reviews are in and I make a pretty stellar spaghetti. Whenever my niece visits, she always asks me if I can make her my spaghetti because it’s way better than any she’s ever had. Getting that kid to eat anything is a struggle, so I’m really glad that she not only eats my food, she asks for seconds.

Favorite Craft to Do in Your Free Time: When I think of the word “crafts”, I imagine, like, art projects made by hand, so I’m not sure I can include writing and gif-making on this one. So excluding those, does drawing count? Even before I got a drawing tablet, I used to doodle all the time even on scraps of paper. I’m not really good at it, but it’s always been something I do just to kinda get my brain to chill.

Most Niche Dislike: Hmm. You know, it’s funny that you mentioned nail polish, izzy, because the first thing that popped into my head was long nails. I have tried to be that girl who gets a full set at the nail salon and I never did it again because the sound of my nails clacking against things bugged me. Like, I can’t even stand the feel of my own natural nails when they’re the slightest bit too long lol.

Opinion on Circuses: Never been to one. But, clowns slightly freak me out so I don’t have the best opinion of their home turfs.

Do You Have Any Sense of Direction: I’d say I do. Or maybe I think I do by association? My parents both have a pretty bad sense of direction and I used to help them a lot by printing out maps and searching for streets in relation to where we were. One of my older brothers used to always assign me as designated navigator because I’m good at keeping an eye on where we are and how to get back on track should we get lost

I liked this tag game! It was fun and refreshing. Gonna tag a couple of you, but please no pressure to respond! Only if you feel like making one 😊 @bioerin @kimievii @koujaaku @ashinlae @wallynorthbynorthwest @fluffyrabbitofdoom @apocalyptickoala @theraincanttouchus @mdzs-rabbithole + anyone who sees this and wants to make one 💖

#tag game #oops that was long #guess i felt like oversharing 😅

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bumirang · 3 years

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happy ffwf!

any fics you're particularly excited to read/write/publish?

Yeah, I mean, it's not my sole obsession, but fanfic is Good Shit.

As a reader, I've been really meaning to catch up on a couple of non-AtLA-verse fics I love:

Purple Days, which is a slightly-AU Game of Thrones cosmic horror timeloop with Joffrey Baratheon as the protagonist. It's exactly as bonkers as it sounds. It's also really, really long, but the worldbuilding and characterization are so fabulously executed that I'll be sad when it's finally over. I also love watching the author hone their craft as they go. They start out kinda rough but improve in leaps and bounds.

This Is Where We Are Now by @purple-compromise. As a TF2 Medic/Reader slowburn romance, it's 1000% better than it has any right to be. The verisimilitude it demonstrates in regards to both the original material and real-world complicated emotions just really strikes a chord with me. Maybe more than any other fic I've read, it feels like Literature. (And full disclosure, I have beta'd for it in the past.)

As a writer, oh boy.

I do actually have a fixfic for The Rise of Skywalker mostly written. I just need to bang out the ending, do some editing, and work up the nerve to post it. It's a project where I gave myself the challenge of taking the pile of nonsense that actually got released in theaters, salvaging as much as I could, and making something I'd actually want to watch.

As for AtLA/LoK, just about everything involves Aang's son Bumi at least tangentially. He's my favorite LoK character, and he doesn't get much love in the fandom. Here's a rundown:

Turtle, Duck, Dragon, Horse is top priority. It's a long-ass story I've put a ton of work into, and the only reason a lot more isn't posted is because I'm not great at working sequentially. I have the third chapter half-written. I'm also just a bit self-conscious about presenting such an ambitious OC-heavy work, since I know that's not what most people are looking for when they hit up AO3. If nothing else, I'm proud of the writing I've done and how much it's improved my craft.

Under the Bone Moon, which I may or may not ever get around to writing. It's basically a Halloween special starring the Gaang 2.0 set in Republic City's boomtown days. Big bro Bumi is 16, Kya is 10 or 11, and both Lin and Tenzin are around 6. Fun sibling dynamics, worldbuilding, and Halloween-esque shenanigans.

Trajectory, which I definitely will write when I get the chance, charts the course of Bumi's love life through the lens of his major relationships. Each chapter will give glimpses of one from beginning to end to show what it meant to both of them. It starts with Princess Izumi and goes from there: Damrong, a fellow soldier; Prithvi, a rowdy metalbender; and Orenda, the hyper-competent waterbender who becomes the one that got away when he balks at the idea of having kids. The epilogue ties into TDDH. OC-heavy, obviously, but you couldn't do the story justice any other way.

I'll leave it at that. Thanks so much for messaging me!

#ask #flamehotman #ffwf #atla fanfic #lok fanfic #fanfic #atla #lok #avatar the last airbender #legend of korra #my stuff

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fizzingwizard · 3 years

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;______; just heard that from September we’re gonna have three students in our cluster who are under 1 year old... (5 in the school total)

aaahhh im exhausted just thinking about it

and whats crazy is in one of the classes with under 1 yos there is a kid who is between 1-2 yo and she cannot walk yet. We have been trying to help her learn and have begun wondering if there is some reason beyond her mother just didn’t really encourage her to walk before. (Like maybe she needs leg braces etc.) So far no news on that but this kid only drags her feet around, obviously she needs constant help, and there are 12 other kids in the class, two of whom are under 1 and three teachers, HOW are they supposed to do it???

and the class that will have three under 1s has two first year teachers in it, that makes me so nervous... They’re both awesome coworkers, this is no shade on them, but under 1s can be TOUGH, it’s SO easy for them to get hurt. idk it feels like an accident waiting to happen.

i’ve been at schools where 5 students was an entire class, if we’re gonna have this many under 1s we should just have a class for them, come on! I love them but they are twice the work of kids on year older than them.

Also the recommended teacher-student ration for 1-3 yos is 1:6, which we abide by, but I believe it’s actually 1:3 or 1:4 when the kids are belong 18/12 mos. Apparently the head office does not care.

These kids are not in my class, I currently teach 2-3s, however I am a long care teacher and I look after them during morning and after care. I do their nap and their snack and play time supervision etc. From 10-2 they’re part of their class, but the rest of the day they belong to all of us.

More work ranting under the cut because I guess I just need to vent to the air.

And we have a LOT of students now - two clusters of going on 30 in each, in very small classrooms where the teachers are expected to watch them like a hawk AND keep constantly busy with numerous tasks at the same time.

Plus our prep time has been cut down this year despite additional work getting put on us, and we have no extra help.

If one teacher is out sick, no one gets prep time.

Don’t remember if I whined about this before, but a month or so ago we had a meeting in which the leader said “If you find you don’t have enough prep time, that’s on you to manage your time better.” It was super condescending and annoying. I’m like, dude, my contract says I get 1 hour prep and 1 hour break. We never ever EVER get the full two hours (and I should mention this is never consecutive, it’s 15 min here, 30 min there, 1 full hour if you’re really lucky). It’s usually at most 1 hr 45. But a 30 min break is fine! I’d love to take a 30 min break. Almost never do. Way too busy.

Like, I won’t get into it, but the laundry list of Stuff To Do recently has been ENORMOUS. In my class, I have 19 students. One of my co-teachers is part time, meaning she’s not around to help during much of prep time, and the other is a leader meaning she’s constantly in meetings or doing leader assignments. They are both fantastic co-workers, but yeah, this means I do ALL the class stuff. I prepare all the crafts, I do a ton of the organizing, and I’m often the only teacher from my class available in the afternoons because part-time teacher went home and leader teacher is in a meeting. So I end up with a lot of the after care stuff.

We have to hand out these big projects that teachers are responsible for preparing for each student on 8/16. We know these are coming and prep for them as soon as possible, but like, I won’t get into this either lol, but it’s so hard. It’s time-consuming by itself, and made worse because all the school computers are crap (like takes-15-min-to-start, another 10 to open the browser, 5 to go to the website, then it freezes, then 5 more, another freeze, etc) and like you have 15 min break time hahahahaha.

I wanted to get such a head start that I just started doing what I could back in the beginning of the year but we lit can’t do the bulk of the work until a certain kind of envelope is delivered and that doesn’t come till summer for some stupid reason. Soooo our long prep days in April when there are no kids around... can we use those to prep for this project? Heck no!

Anyway. This year’s is due on 8/16. This coming week we are off for obon break. This year also, the company is doing the project slightly differently. Instead of staggering what class gives out their projects to their students when, we all have to do it at once. We are our company’s biggest school, sooo my honest thought is no one at the head office thought about us when they made this change. The other schools don’t have to stagger anyway, they have at most two classes. We have four.

So this means everyone is printing their projects at the same time. For one student, you need 10 sheets on A3 paper. For my class of 19, that is 190 sheets of paper. For four classes, we’re over 700 sheets total. THAT IS A LOT OF PAPER.

So I get to work this morning and boss says “Yeah so we’re out of A3 paper.”

!!!

IT’S DUE MONDAY.

There was a little bit left so I just charged and printed as much of my stuff as I could in the morning before anyone else could. Then, miraculously, another packet of A3 paper appeared out of nowhere, and we were able to print most of the rest of our students’ projects. (My coworker who is a leader has not printed hers yet because she is super busy and isn’t finished. Again, she’s an awesome coworker, I wish I could have helped her more, but uh, I’m also swamped and not taking breaks, so. Hopefully she can do it before we really do run out of A3 paper.)

Getting more paper is no big deal, it’s just that no one has the time, and this is due Monday.

So I was super stressed. Sooooo super stressed for such a dumbbbb reason. And I don’t understand why these projects have to go out on Monday anyway. Some kids don’t even come to school on Mondays. Like. Just make sure they get them next week, isn’t that good enough?? Why make us stress and panic.

Everyone else seemed fine though, I was the only one tearing my hair out because I’m the type who finishes everything a day early so I have a day to check it over... I am not spontaneous and I hate to rush...

I lit told my coworkers, because regardless of the paper situation we are still behind because we have not had any time to organize the projects, that I will just stay late tomorrow to do it. It’s the Friday before a break so I don’t mind too much. I am really tired tho and would of course rather just go home and sleep but. I’ve done this before. Finishing up this project will take 1.5 hours - 2 hours at the current state it’s in, IF I can just sit down and do it uninterrupted. (Have I mentioned these projects are HEAVY?? And there’s 19 of them?? It’s a big job just to take them out and start putting them together >.<)

So tomorrow evening that is what I will likely be doing -.-;

There are INNUMERABLE other STUPID parts of this project - the idea behind it is great, but the way we are required to make it is absolutely bonkers and desperately needs a revamp but does anyone listen to a preschool teacher? heck no lol

uggh.

I feel better after venting tho.

I like my job, I just wish humans in general gave a shit, not even about quality of life (since obvs that’s expecting too much lol, also as a person with privilege I’m aware I’ve already got it pretty darn good), but just about not making jobs that are ridiculous. Just plan them out better, sheesh. There’s no reason for all this running around. The projects don’t need to be printed. Or they don’t need to be so huge. They don’t need all this fuss and nonsense. They are a good idea, but we could do them in a way that would be sooo much less stressful.

(The funniest part of all being, it’s a project for the parents mainly, and the parents... don’t like it x’D No they really don’t. They are happy to have the project, but first they’ve got to get it home, and it is HUGE and HEAVY and UNWIELDY lmao. And some of them are carrying twin 2 year olds and both of their futons home as well, and we’re like “here you go, two giant projects for you to take home!” And the parents are like “thanks????”)

#fizz's life #work

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letterboxd · 3 years

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The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.

Related content

Kairit’s list of “She Did THAT!!!” films

Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes

Up in the Air: The Letterboxd Showdown of Best Airplanes in film

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is available in select theaters and on video on demand now.

#life in film #letterboxd life in film #female director #directed by women #52 films by women #action film #action genre #chloe grace moretz #wwii film #ww2 film #terminator 2 #chinese new zealander #cheng pei-pei #tom eagles #jojo rabbit #female action hero #letterboxd

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storm-de-la-rosa · 5 years

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Welcome to Lancashire

I’m Samantha. I’m a born and bred Lancashire Lass. I love all things vintage and retro, and I’m a huge foodie. I try to make foods from around the world, but I’m particularly proud of good quality home made british cooking and baking.

My favourite eras in terms of vintage are from the 1920′s to the 1950′s. The women always looked so elegant even when they were dressed casually. There is a huge feeling of empowerment when you look the best you are able to look.

In terms of my home, I like a vintage country look, lots of cosiness and lots of flowers and greenery.

I decided to start a blog because I remember some of the amazing food my grandma made when I was young. She could literally turn her hand to anything. She was told when she was 27 that she had a heart condition and that all she was fit for was ‘brewing up and dusting’. She ran a business with her mother, she married and had 5 kids, she became a retail area manager, which at the time it was unheard of for a woman to do that. She could cook, do DIY, was able to recreate designer gowns, made beautiful wedding cakes and on top of this was a feisty proud woman who took no crap from people. But she was one of of the kindest and most forward thinking women in the world. My greatest regret is that I never got her recipes from her. She never needed them because she had them all inside her head. So I decided to start a hunt to find recipes and adapt them until I recreated what I was able to remember her making. That just led me to experimenting with lots of different recipes and those are now written down for future generations of my family to enjoy. And because I wanted to share these with people who think British food is just roast beef.

In terms of crafting this has become a passion project for me because I truly believe that it makes the items in your home more precious as you have the knowledge that it was down to your choices and work that your home is just as you want it.

Add into this that I’m a vintage lover and adore the pinup fashions and you get a slightly eccentric, slightly bonkers woman who is embracing a love for life and expressing herself.

#vintage #retro #passion #home #cooking #foodie #lancashire #lancashirelass #countryhome #crafts

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thelondonfilmschool · 6 years

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INTERVIEW with Newcastle-based and one-of-a-kind filmmaker: Benjamin Bee

Writer/Director Benjamin Bee graduated from London Film School in 2015 and moved back to his home town of Newcastle Upon Tyne, where he’s continued to hone the unique brand of personal- tragi-comedy which has seen his films screened at some of the world’s biggest film festivals and attracted the likes of Mike Leigh to his Crowdfunding videos. Ben turns his own life story into art, and it’s not hard to see why – within minutes of meeting him I’d been told an anecdote involving an axe, a crazed lunatic and a carton of banana milkshake. Below is the publishable version of Ben’s take on the North-South divide, his time at LFS and what it is that makes his ‘bonkers’ stories so universal.

S.M: Can you tell me a bit about your life before applying to London Film School?

B.B: I left school in Newcastle when I was 14 without any qualifications, and then I went to an access to college course. They did photography and had an old, broken VHS video camera, and with the people that I met there we started making comedy, stupid little films. They were unscripted, and weirdly I used that to get into the University of Westminster to do Contemporary Media Practice. That was in 2002, and then at the end of that course I made a short film called The Plastic Toy Dinosaur, which was produced by Rob Watson who’s an NFTS producing grad who’s doing really well now. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I wrote it when I was 21 and I directed it when I was 22. I moved back to Newcastle and started working in a bar, but I hated it and I was miserable and the only thing I realised I had was this short film. I didn’t know about anything, I didn’t even know Cannes or Sundance existed.

So, I just started entering it in places that I found and one of them was the BBC3 New Filmmaker of the Year Award. There were tons of submissions and they selected it down to the last ten. It was actually a really good year – Alice Lowe had written and starred in one of them, and Sean Conway had a film as well, he writes for Ray Donavan now. It was nice because people started to screen the film and it seemed like they liked it and it resonated with audiences, but I still had no idea what I was doing and I was incredibly naïve. I mean, seriously dyslexic and had the reading and writing age of an 8-year-old. Not going to school probably didn’t help. So, I was kind of lost. I started working a theatre box office and I worked, like, 60 hours a week and tried to save money. And then I saw a Skillset bursary advertised. I’d always looked at LFS but I couldn’t afford the fees, but eventually after I’d saved some money from my job I applied and I got the bursary.

S.M: What did applying for that involve?

B.B: It’s based on previous work and it’s means tested so you basically have to be poor and talented, or at least fake them into believing that you have some form of talent (laughs). I think I had something to say, coming from a slightly different background, and all my stories are weirdly personal. You go in front of a panel and when I got called back I literally cried like a small child. And then I went to LFS! It was interesting and difficult and there were people from so many different walks of life. I learnt the craft of filmmaking – I tried to eat up everything.

The most important thing for me was the people – you’re surrounded by people who are really passionate about film. It’s two years surrounded by people who’ll put a lot of effort in, and I met a lot of people who had a lot of fun making films that I’m really proud of. I did a film called Step Right Up when I was there, which was my Term 4 exercise. We had 36 minutes of film stock to make a nine-minute film and it was screened at 40 film festivals. We got long-listed for the BAFTA, which means we were down to the last 10 or 15, which had never been done before by a fourth term film. It was huge.

S.M: What do you think it was about that film that made it so successful?

B.B: I make comedies and they’re personal. I’ve never really struggled with getting films into festivals because I don’t try to make arduous bulls**t. It’s personal, and also I’m not the most masculine man but I know lots of masculine men who do have feelings, and everybody has a shared experience of feelings and pain so there’s nothing that makes even the most masculine, awful guy not sensitive. A lot of my films are about paternal bonds or absent father figures, because my dad left and he was an utter c***. So, I’ve got a lot of things like that, that kind of resonate.

My new one’s about something that genuinely happened, which was when my dad left when I was five and my mum decided to take me and my brother out of school and take us to Metroland, which is a theme park in Newcastle. My brother went on the dodgems but I was too little, so I had to go on the merry-go-round. It was amazing, and I was on a big white horse going round and round. Every time I’d come round I’d see my mum just stood there in floods and floods of tears, and then I’d go past her, and I could see my brother having the best time ever. That’s an analogy for my relationships with my siblings! I think if you say things that are deeply personal then they’re always going to do much better than things that aren’t you. When I started in term one and term two, I started trying to make stuff to look more “intelligent”, and then I realised that it wasn’t making me at all happy. So, by term four I made something ridiculous and by graduation I made a film called Sebastian which was a horror comedy which was also a bit nuts.

S.M: Was it always your plan to go back to Newcastle after graduation?

B.B: The day I handed my grad film in I went for a meeting to direct a pilot taster for Baby Cow, Steve Coogan and Henry Normal’s company. I got that, and I brought Yiannis (Manolopoulos, fellow LFS student and cinematographer) in, it was written by a friend of mine, Dan Mersh, who was also in Step Right Up, Plastic Toy Dinosaur, Sebastian and Mordechai. And that was really good because I got to meet Henry Normal, who was the managing director of the company. He’d written the Royle Family, Mrs Merton, he’d produced some of my fave TV shows, including the Mighty Boosh … He loved it. but Channel 4 didn’t pick it up. Then I moved back to Newcastle, in 2015, and broke my ankle running for a train! I was in a cast for over a year.

Then I applied to the Jewish Film Fund for my film Mordechai, I’m not actually Jewish but the film’s subject is. It’s doing really well, it’s got into Palm Springs, BFI London Film Festival, and various others. It’s about these identical twins, one of which has left the community and one of whom has stayed at home. There’s an ultra-orthodox community in Gateshead and it’s quite insular and interesting. So, I developed a story about, what if one of them had left and then had to come home for a reason? The dad dies and the other brother comes home and he has to go and pick him up. They’ve got very different life choices – one brother’s dressed in black and the other turns up wearing tie-dyed hippy shit. He’s still Jewish but in his own way. Mordechai is really happy and charming and Daniel, who stayed at home, is a bit more down-trodden and miserable. Then Mordechai drops dead and Daniel makes the decision to body swap and becomes Mordechai and goes to his own funeral. It comes out the end quite positive but it’s also quite emotional!

S.M: You work a lot with producer Maria Caruana Galizia – is she someone you met through LFS?

B.B: No, she’s from Malta. She moved to Newcastle after living in Scotland for a while (I think), and there’s very few producers here. I met her at a networking event – she liked something I’d made, I liked something she’d made and we just decided to try and apply for stuff. She’s fu***ng awesome, super talented and incredibly hardworking. Also, she puts up with me…

S.M: Do you find that being based up in Newcastle has its pros and cons?

B.B: It really does. The benefits are that you can shoot anywhere for dead cheap but crewing’s impossible because every good member of crew’s doing Vera or The Dumping Ground. There’s swings and roundabouts. It’s beautiful, and has a better quality of life but there is definitely a massive divide. All the work’s in London, all the agents are there.

S.M: Do you manage to make a living out of the work you’re doing at the moment?

B.B: I’m a very cheap human being. It’s difficult when you start out because a lot of the stuff that you’re doing, like the shorts, aren’t going to make any money unless you start winning prize money. I’m at the stage now where it’s a little bit easier because I can apply for funding for development from the BFI etc. That’s what I’m applying for at the moment. I’m doing a project with Henry Normal, a documentary on him and his poetry. I’m also just finishing Metroland and I’m really, really happy with it, but I’ve got no idea how it’s going to go down ‘cause it’s a bit mental.

S.M: How did you get Mike Leigh to appear in the crowdfunding promo?

B.B: He pops up in it, and basically the whole joke is that the film’s kind of like Weekend at Bernie’s, but imagine Weekend at Bernie’s if it was directed by Mike Leigh. You see the door open and it’s Mike Leigh going “Ben, can you stop phoning and emailing me and if you give me another copy of Weekend at Bernie’s …” (laughs).

I sent him an email going, “Hi Mike! Creative England are insisting that I do Crowdfunding and I really don’t wanna do it, so instead of making a video in which everybody’s positive, I want to make a video where everybody’s really negative about the experience.” He said yes without questioning it for a second… When I shot the video with Mike it was me, Yiannis and Eoin Maher, who did Filmmaking at LFS as well, and Mike who was just really hilarious. It was a lot of fun. Mike’s always been incredibly kind and supportive. He’s got a really good sense of humour. It’s the thing I love about his work to be honest.

S.M: Have you found it cathartic making such personal work based on your own life?

B.B: Unless you’re very good at what you do, this is just my advice, you can hide everything but what you do has to at some point be personal and resonate. Deconstruct any movie ever, like every movie Wes Anderson ever made is basically about his father walking out on his family, even though you don’t always realise it. It’s all about masculinity. It’s that thing that all your faults are your strongest features. I definitely find it therapeutic and I definitely think you deal with stuff. Spielberg says that it’s the only job where you get paid for therapy. I think that’s a great quote because it’s true in a way. Especially if you can’t afford therapy!

S.M: What do you think was the most important thing that LFS taught you?

B.B: The main revelation was that, whenever anybody goes into anything, doesn’t matter if it’s school, college or university, everybody comes in with a competitive nature that they’re going to be the best. Being competitive with yourself and wanting to make the best work is amazing, that’s the best way to be. But anybody else, whether they’re a director or whatever, should be your friends and your peer group, people that will help you. You basically have a support network with other filmmakers. That was really helpful, because it felt like you had a cheerleading squad and you could also do it for other people and you’d be really grateful. And that’s the industry – you’re not really in competition because nobody’s going to make the same film as you. You learn that very quickly at LFS because there’s people making such different work and you can really appreciate it. Then those people can come and work and collaborate on something you’re making, and you make something different and everybody learns from each other. Definitely the international vibe really helps as well. I was one of very few Brits and that was really nice, because obviously in Newcastle it’s mostly just people from there. In my term I had Yiannis from Greece, Pauline who was French, Rodrigo who was Mexican, Habib who’s American … it was really nice. I enjoyed it. Everybody’s great! Working with happy, positive people who feel comfortable in a nice environment is what makes the best work. And I think that’s what comes from having so many passionate people at LFS. It was a life-changing opportunity.

#mike leigh #filmmaking #weekendatbernies #filmstudies #wes anderson #creativeskillset #lfsorguk #gateshead #newcastle #steve coogan #babycow #metroland #sundance #rob watson #sean conway #dyslexia #london #bfi #jewish film fund

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patrickmmeaney · 7 years

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Twin Peaks is Back

Twin Peaks is almost back! In three days, we'll be watching the first new material in twenty-five years, and I still find it hard to believe. After watching the series for the first time in 2003, I hoped to one day see the deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me, but never imagined the series actually returning. So, I'm very curious and eager to see what happens in this new batch of episodes.

But, with this renewed chatter, it feels like the perfect time to address something that's always bothered me in the media narrative about the show. The general consensus about the show is that it had an amazing first season, then quickly burned out when David Lynch went to work on other projects, and was forced by ABC to reveal the answer to the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer too soon.

First off, Lynch was most involved with the show during the first part of the second season, where he directed the two hour premiere, and also episodes two and seven. Episode seven of the second season, in which Laura's killer is revealed, is a masterpiece of an episode, and these episodes contain many of the most famous sequences from the show.

He actually was missing for most of the first season, having gone off to shoot Wild at Heart. The show didn't suffer too much for his absence, but I think there's a difference between the slightly lighter, more soapy tone of those first season episodes, with the Invitation to Love cutaways, and the more haunting first run of season two, which carry more Lynch hallmarks.

But, my biggest media gripe is how people constantly blame ABC forcing Lynch and Frost to reveal the killer for the show's decline. I'm not denying the show went downhill after, but I think if anything, the Laura Palmer murder felt exhausted by the end of season one, and carrying it another seven episodes was a strain.

That's largely due to the fact that we learn so much about the night Laura died early on in the show, and fewer and fewer suspects become plausible. There wasn't room for seasons and seasons of additional twists and turns in a fairly fixed timeline of events. How many more secret diaries or new acquaintances could they encounter?

And, as long as the Laura Palmer murder mystery is out there, the 'side quests' into things like rescuing Audrey from One Eyed Jack's or the various cocaine deals on the Canadian border always felt like a distraction from the real story. It creates a paradox, where you have to focus on Laura's murder, but also can't focus too much or the story there will be exhausted.

Ultimately, I think the pacing worked, and the whole arc plays out wonderfully. To try to carry that investigation through even five more episodes, let alone the rest of the season would have strained the audience too far, and would not have been creatively fulfilling. People were already angry that Laura's murder wasn't solved at the end of season one, I don't think drawing it out more was the answer.

Most of the narratives surrounding the show's decline seem designed to insulate David Lynch from blame for the show's failings. If he is the genius artistic mind from which all good about the show flows, it makes sense to frame the network as a callous corporate villain responsible for the show's decline. But, if you actually look at the material, it's not accurate.

Laura Palmer's murder was the spine on which the story rested. You could have goofy stuff like Andy and Lucy, because it was a break from the serious material at the center of the story. Without that spine, the goofy stuff just seems dumb, and there's no sense of momentum for the series as a whole.

Lynch and the team did eventually find that path forward, and you can see it in the last few episodes and Fire Walk With Me. Laura's murder becomes a window into this eternal struggle of good and evil with strange otherworldly characters floating around. It's the core conflict at the heart of all of Lynch's work, made manifest in the story of the Black and White Lodge, and it works as a pretty awesome conceit for a show. This small town is the battleground between these forces, and Cooper is squaring off against an otherworldly evil spirit Bob.

The actual Lynch directed material after the murder revelation focuses largely on this, with the finale being a battle for Cooper's soul, and Fire Walk With Me chronicling the battle for Laura's soul, and alluding to the larger struggle of those who seek the world's garmonbozia.

Perhaps all that Lynch needed was time after wrapping up the Laura Palmer murder to hone in on this new direction. But, with the grueling schedule of producing 22 episodes a year, he didn't have that time, and by the time he figured out where to go, it was too late.

Or perhaps the tone of Twin Peaks was impossible to sustain past a short run of episodes. Quirky, particularly Lynch's brand of it, is not easy to replicate, and what seems fresh and original can quickly feel stale and derivative. But, keeping Laura Palmer's murder unsolved would not have fixed those problems.

For me, Twin Peaks remains an absolute pantheon TV show. Shows that have come since, like The Sopranos or The Wire, have more control of tone and consistency across the entire body of work, but no show hits the unique heights of Twin Peaks. Those first sixteen episodes are full of perfect moments, and the bonkers last episode is still the most surreal thing ever to air on TV.

And for me, Fire Walk With Me is the crowning achievement of the whole venture. It's a film that delves deeply into the series' twisted mythology, and manages to turn a ghost from the series into one of the most viscerally alive and fiery characters ever realized on screen. Amidst moments of unparalleled surrealism is the most intense immersions in a character's subjectivity in cinema history.

I watched the film again last night to refresh myself for the new series, and was again blown away by the craft on an individual scene level. The pink room nightclub sequence is an assault of sound and visual that tells you so much about Laura's character, and functions as a self contained thematic encapsulation of the entire film.

So many people consider the film an unnecessary footnote, or a cinematic indulgence, but to me, it's the thematic and emotional core of the entire Twin Peaks story, and for a long time, was a wonderful conclusion to the story. Now, the show's coming back, and who knows how we'll perceive 'Judy' or the formica table or the other moments in the film that now feel like glimpses into a vast mythology we would never fully understand.

Either way, it's been ten years since I saw INLAND EMPIRE, and I'm ready to finally watch some new David Lynch.

#Twin Peaks #fire walk with me

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