#this has got to be one of the funniest moments in cinematic history

[lalalaugenbrot]

He has been guilty of sensuality........ with women.

#maurice 1987 #e. m. forster #maurice (1987) #maurice #more things from my drafts! #still somewhat unhappy with the font and the speed of the gifs #but i also feel like sharing this #this has got to be one of the funniest moments in cinematic history #maurice's face #and istg the way he says fornicating #i am in tears just thinking about this #emf #film #*

[hopefullystillatheatrestudent]

i'm so excited about you taking asks again ahhhh okay so. if you'd absolutely had to choose. what would be your top 5 cockles moments, and why? thank you ily <3

here’s the thing: there are so many routes i could go down with this, because cockles moments come in all shapes and sizes and formats. these include moments from their panels, their bloopers, the footage we get when they don’t even know they’re being recorded, stories being passed down from photo ops & autographs(one of my personal favorite ways to get cockles, tbh, because they’re all insane), and social media(tweets to each other, instagram posts & comments, etc.). 

SO! since many a list like this has already been made, and i want to stand out from the crowd, what i’m gonna do is definitively give the number one spot to each of these five categories.(i might even throw in honourable mentions because they’re so despicably in love that they warrant that. i really put my whole pussy into this, guys, i hope you’re happy.) 

disclaimer: these are my own personal opinions. but that also means i’m right. so. enjoy. 

number one: top cockles panel moment

so we’re starting off with a bang, because how do you even BEGIN to rank what atrocities jensen and misha commit at jibcon. every single one they’ve had is damning in it’s own right, for different reasons.

however, considering just how much unabashed fuckery they’ve given us to sift through, it’s a good thing i do have a personal favorite despite it all. it’s heartwarming, the sweetest thing i’ve ever seen, AND it’s jarringly cinematic - mainly because it has a whole ass arc to it that was years in the making. it might even be surprising to some people, but my favorite cockles panel moment, and what i consider the one that encompasses their entire gut-wrenching journey from 2008-2013 in the most sweepingly romantic gesture possible, is this one.

i want this burned into my retinas. i am not even joking. when i'm through with my explanation, let me convince you why this is thee most romantic cockles moment of all time.

first, some history: people call this the resume off, but many seem to forget the botched attempt at a resume off a year prior. and yes, you guessed it: it's during their break up. it's a juicy time period for a reason, guys. it came across as exceedingly one-sided and VERY awkward. let me refresh your memory as to just how bad it was, and just how hard jensen was trying and ultimately failing at winning misha over: the funniest part of the whole resume off in 2013??? every joke/bit had literally already been made/done. they were just going through the motions again, but the difference THIS time...is that misha reciprocated jensen's energy. it. is. fascinating. i want to get into it more detail in another post, and i'll link it here when i'm done, but the main takeaway, i think, and the main difference that showcases how much they've grown in a year, is that in jib 3, misha flat out refused to do an accent, and this time around, he indulges jensen for literal minutes. when i tell you they're crazy, they're crazy. i can't wait to actually dive into it later.

ANYWAY, the resume off culminates in this moment here. and, like, a million things happen in this gifset. actually, more like a million and one. the music starts playingneediremindyouthatthesongissingingintherain(h e l p), misha starts dancing, jensen 'perpetually fake grumpy' ackles lets misha think he's not going to join, misha sits down defeated, but no!!! that was jensen's plan all along(look at his stupid fucking smirk) and he offers his arm to his dance partner who immediately grins like a fool, jensen then leads misha into their kick step, they perfectly synchronise and let loose, and are then very clearly having the time of their lives, hanging off of each other with joy and ease. from their expressions alone i can tell that this moment is so. so. so. so! much more than what initially meets the eye. i mean-misha is fighting back the biggest smile i've ever seen. to me, it reads like jensen is offering something to misha, something that misha kind of gave up on expecting, and him offering his arm like that is like, a surprise to him in the best possible way(and it's so not platonic, let me just say that.) as soon as jensen did that, it ushered in a new era of cockles. this panel is jensen and misha's favourite for a reason, and i think this moment is the biggest clue as to why.

whew!!! ok. that took a lot out of me and that was only point one. moving on,

number two: top cockles blooper moment

cockles bloopers hold an extremely special place in my heart, because it shows just how fucking disastrous jensen and misha are. they are so goddamn infatuated with each other that they HOLD UP PRODUCTION ALL THE TIME TO FLIRT WITH EACH OTHER(???). let me repeat. let it sink in. jensen ackles; arguably one of the most professional actors on that show who puts everything he has into each scene, with mountains and mountains of notes to prove it: would rather hold up production to flirt with misha collins. this sounds fake. it's not. he does it. all. the. time. and here's the thing guys!!! i'm gonna let you in on a secret!!! misha loves it. he loveesssss it. on top of that-misha collins: overlooked because he's pranked and people assume he's unprofessional as well, but his only pranks are in retaliation/off-set, and he rarely if EVER causes problems if he can help it....lets himself get carried away when it comes to jensen making kissy faces at him!!! are you actually kidding me!!! i mean. misha. it's just a face. you've seen it a million times. i don't buy that it triggers something in you that strongly....you like it, and you like jensen's reaction. you can't fool me!!! lisa berry's face in that one gifset shows just how fed up the crew is with their gross, coupley boyfriend antics.

i could pull up so many examples. sooooooo many. but my favourite was sealed since the moment i saw it.

i actually already wrote an analysis on it but i can't find it :(((( which SUCKS because i really unpacked the whole thing. i'll try to summarise.

basically, a backstory is part of this too!!! jensen and misha both had a really really hard time with this scene(because it's explicitly romantic there i said it), they sat down for hours and poured over their scripts together, they were super super nervous going into filming, both of them, jensen especially, were super hard on themselves for their performances not being true to their characters but they both complimented the other's work(boyfriend moments fr). so, yeah. they weren't confident going into shooting. and how do they get themselves to feel better???? by cuddling each other, apparently.

a lot. a LOT. happens in this specific blooper. to the point that i saw it years before i knew about cockles and it raised all sorts of flags for me.

1) stop pulling my face towards your crotch(as a thinly veiled request that misha would, in fact, move jensen's face towards his crotch, considering it was jensen moving himself there in the first place. also, why so comfy down there guys???) 2) you're my baby daddy i know(in the most intimate voice i've ever heard please) 3) i know, i know, i love you too i didn't say i love you i know but you wanted to say it etc. misha's right, of course. that's what jensen meant.

it just reeks of comfort, familiarity and intimacy between the two, and it's a moment that is extremely sweet and silly at the same time. they're so <3

number three: top cockles found footage moment

WONDERFUL category. truly the culmination of the cockles experience. many people have said that shipping cockles doesn't work because 'they're just onstage you dummies!! they're playing it up for the audience!!!' here's the thing, love. i could not disagree with you more. once you climb your way up the cockles ladder, you soon learn that they are, in fact, playing their dynamic DOWN, not up. they really are just Like That™, and they could not care less about the paying audience, if we're being honest, considering how much time they take to giggle with each other and refuse to let the audience in on the joke. and i love them for it <3

anyway, my point is that this category is for all you naysayers out there, all you 'jensen and misha's relationship is just for show and is real life queerbaiting'(?????lordhelp???) oh yeah? ok, explain this.

he. he. he calls jensen sweetheart. literally enough said. there's nothing to really add here, except, misha and jared then immediately engage in damage control. jared's method is distraction and misha's is retconning('get out of the car, dude') this was what got me to buy into the cockles dumpster for GOOD good. you don't call your buddy sweetheart accidentally and sound so completely earnest while doing it! especially not when that buddy is jensen ackles!!! you think he would let any of his friends call him that? do you?

one more thing; if it was a slip of the tongue, little mouth thing or whatever, you think jared wouldn't have jumped on it immediately??? i can hear it now. 'did you just call him SWEETHEART???' yeah. that's what i thought. you know why he didn't? because it was too revealing.

number four: top cockles autograph moment

i mean, i think we all know what it's gonna be, and if you don't, well, do i have the piece de cockles resistance that is gonna send you over the edge.

if you haven't heard of this story by now, as a cockles, truther, i'm gonna go ahead and get you to read it, because there is no possible heterosexual explanation for any of it, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

spoiler alert: it's the story where phones weren't allowed in an auto session, jensen nuzzles himself in misha's hair, leans his full body weight onto him, holds his hand, etc. etc. i'm imploding just repeating this back, actually. also, just, the sheer amount of stories from photo ops where they tackle hug each other or slap each other's asses or sing romantic songs to each other or almost kiss is, frankly, a lot. if i could wish for anything, it would be to witness them in person.

and finally,

number five: top cockles social media moment

this one is super difficult, because there's obviously a lot to choose from. but you know what? full send, i'm going with this one:

i just. what to say about this. how often do misha and jensen watch sunsets together for it to qualify as ‘always’ ??? why are sunsets synonymous with their relationship??? that’s like??? a very romantic thing????? ‘this guy’??? the fact that it’s a CANDID??? i don’t know guys.

that could have been better but i am TIRED so. there you go rose ily

#cockles #cockles ask #liz answers #i really just. spend hours. writing about misha and his boyfriend. #why. why do i. do that #long post for ts

[raendown]

I return from the dead with a fic that isn't even for the Naruto fandom and I don't really have an explanation for myself.

Pairing: SamBucky Word count: 2317 Fandom: MCU Summary: Visiting Steve was always strange now that the guy was old and retired. Still, of all the things Sam expected out of today, witnessing a prime example of gay panic from the co-worker that's been mysteriously avoiding him was not one of them.

Follow the link or read it under the cut!

KO-FI and commission info under the header!

Honestly, the fact that Steve's house smelled like prunes was probably one of the funniest things that Sam had ever heard in his life. More than anything he would have loved to go back in time, to the days of reading about glorified heroes in history textbooks, and tell his fifteen year old self that Captain America, Steve Rogers, retired in a house that smelled like prunes. God, his best friend just had to throw himself in to being old the way he threw himself in to everything else.

"Is there a special reason for you visiting?" Steve's voice was more tremulous these days, less steady but no less warm. Just hearing him again after the shameful amount of weeks it had been since his last visit made Sam grin.

"Nah, just thought I'd pop in and see if you'd expired yet. Your birthday's coming up. Gonna be, what, three hundred? A thousand?"

Steve narrowed his eyes but there was fondness in them so it wasn't very scary even if he could probably still tackle Sam across the room if he wanted to. At this point it would hurt him too but he could do it. "You, young man, are-"

He looked chagrined at himself when Sam cut him off with a laugh.

"You shitting me? Did you really just call me young man? See if I ever let you live that down."

His friend grumbled but accepted the teasing as his due. That was just what he got for going back in time and doubling down on being so much older than his own best friends.

Since it had indeed been a little too long after they last saw each other there was quite a bit of catching up for them to do. Over cool glasses of sweet tea and a plate of cookies the two of them spent a pleasant couple of hours shooting the shit until Sam could almost forget the years that stretched between them now. It was jarring, sometimes, looking away from those clear blue eyes to realize all over again just how many wrinkles they were set in. Sometimes he hated it. Other times he could only smile to know that at least one of their ragtag bunch had found the peace they were looking for.

Eventually all that sweet tea went right to his bladder and Sam excused himself to use the bathroom. When he returned he took in the sight of his friend all snug under one of the blankets his late wife had knit and sighed, feeling maudlin suddenly for no good reason.

"I should probably get out of your hair," he said. "Let you get in your afternoon nap or whatever. No, stay there man, I'll clean up." His smile was easy as he snagged the dishes from their grazing and hauled it all over to the kitchen.

"You sure?" Steve's voice floated after him. "Nothing else you want to get off your chest?"

"Huh?"

Sam frowned at the cups he'd just placed in the sink, running back through his mind. They'd talked about pretty much everything he could think of.

"You didn't mention Buck once, you know. I thought the two of you were friends now."

"Ah. Yeah. So did I." The corners of his mouth twisted with a little bitterness, a little confusion. After everything they'd been through and the number of times Bucky had accepted his invitations down to Delacroix he'd thought they were well past the point of calling themselves friends. Maybe he himself felt something a little more than that but he knew better than to push.

That was probably why Bucky's sudden radio silence hurt so much though.

"Trouble in paradise?" Steve called from the other room and Sam snorted.

“Shit, I don’t know. One minute we’re fine and the next he just up and disappears on me again. I may or may not have checked a bunch of obituaries for your name just in case because I have no idea what I might have done to piss him off.” Sam pursed his lips. He’s already gone over all this with Sarah a half dozen times and in all the recounts he’d done of their last couple missions he still couldn’t find any particularly bad moment between him and his best friend. Unfortunately the sweet tea he was glaring at didn’t have any answers either so he snatched the pitcher up and moved to put it in the fridge.

“Have you tried, oh I don’t know, asking him what’s wrong?”

“You think I didn’t try that?”

Steve’s hum drifted down the hallway with a distinct note of sass. “Neither one of you is very famous for your communication.”

“Excuse you, I was a counselor. A certified veteran’s counselor. Communicating with people was literally my job until your overly buff ass came running around all ‘on your left’ and ‘everyone I know is trying to kill me’.” Sam huffed as he snapped the fridge closed. “I damn well tried to talk to him but he’s not answering my texts or my calls. Short of breaking in to his apartment I don’t really know what else you want me to do.”

Without any other excuses to keep him in the kitchen Sam heaved a sigh, knowing he couldn’t dawdle any longer. He could only get to the door by going though the living room so his choices were either run away out the back, which he would never ever hear the end of, or go back in to the living room and face Steve with his stupidly wise and knowing eyes. Seriously, let a guy live to almost two hundred and suddenly he thought he knew everything. Annoying was what it was.

He was only halfway down the hall when he heard the front door open. Sam very carefully swallowed down the jibe he’d just been about to deliver and hoped that meant what he thought it meant. Maybe Steve had finally gone vague after all and bailed in the middle of their conversation; he’d rather chase a crazy old coot down the street than talk about his feelings regarding one James Buchanan Barnes. Actually if he looked at it from the right angle then chasing an old coot down the street was pretty much his job description whenever he and his partner teamed up on missions. Sam was just glad they hadn’t been called in to one since this whole silent treatment had started because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know whether or not Bucky would still have his back even when the guy was mad at him over reasons unknown.

Two more steps and Sam froze in his tracks, eyes wide with disbelief. Bucky’s shoulders were hunched in to himself with something bridling on panic as he fit himself through the front door and kicked it shut behind himself, eyes wild and fixed on the ground between his feet, nervous energy pouring out of him in a way Sam hadn’t seen before. From his spot on the couch Steve watched his childhood friend let himself in with serene indifference.

“Didn’t know you’d be over today,” was all he said. Then he smiled benignly when Bucky let out a soft whine.

“Help,” Bucky pleaded. “I’m dying.”

Then Bucky slid down to his knees and face planted in the carpet, arms and legs splaying out wide. Steve hummed.

“You know,” he murmured, “no one ever believes me when I tell them you’re this dramatic.”

“Steve! I’m having a crisis!”

“I tell everyone you’re a drama queen and they just shake their heads at me.”

“This is important! You have to kill me, Steve. Or I’m gonna just- just-!” Bucky’s voice petered out with another extended whine muffled by the carpet that probably didn’t smell any better from that close up.

Crossing one leg over the other, Steve folded his hands in his lap with a great lack of concern for the ridiculous scene playing out before him. Sam remained frozen in the hallway, wondering if Bucky even realized he was there, but he got an answer to that almost faster than if he’d bothered to ask himself.

“What’s wrong, pal?”

“It’s Sam!” Bucky cried. His arms lifted up like wings to flail briefly before falling back to the floor in a boneless sprawl. “Please just crush my head or something. I can’t take this.”

“Ah, yes, I hear you’ve been avoiding him.”

Whatever kind of noise Bucky was trying to make, it came out sounding more like he was choking on carpet fumes. “Of course I’m avoiding him!”

“Now why on earth would you do that?”

“I want to stick my tongue in the gap between his teeth!” Bucky said, entirely unaware of the sparks that were suddenly running up Sam’s spine in the hallway. “Help me, Steve! I want to press my thumb in the little dimple on his back. He has a dimple on his back! Why!? Steve I want to hold his hand! What the fuck!”

Steve had both eyebrows up near his hairline and the most shit eating grin any human on the planet had ever worn when he turned his head to look at Sam. Frozen with his eyes on the figure currently panicking in to the floor, Sam paid him no attention. He was busy processing. After getting to know Bucky, inviting him to stay in Delacroix time and time again, the dramatics weren’t actually that much of a surprise. Obviously as they grew closer he’d gotten a number of glimpses in to who the real Bucky Barnes was under the grouchy veneer he presented to the world. Watching him starfish on the ground and whine wasn’t too far from what he’d already seen.

Hearing him say anything about his tongue in conjecture with Sam’s teeth, on the other hand, now that was a bit unexpected. More than a bit.

“I think Shuri called this ‘gay panic’ and honestly I’m in agreement,” Bucky went on mindlessly. “If I have to watch him go through one more workout and not grab his ass with both hands then I’m just going to rip both of them off. Who needs hands if I cannot grab Sam Wilson’s ass with them!?”

“You may be slightly exaggerating the situation, I feel,” Steve told him.

Bucky snorted. “I am not. I absolutely am not. Why is he so hot? And nice? I hate that. Except I don’t. Steve why is he so nice to me?”

“That might be a question you should ask him.”

“Oh yeah, sure, I’ve got lots of questions for him! Hey Sam, why are you nice to me? Hey Sam, can I lick your cheekbones? Hey Sam, how big is your cock?”

“Well. Not that I’ve ever thought to ask that myself but, alright. Go on, Sam, how big is it?”

Sam had just enough time to cross his arms over his chest and assume a very casual pose leaning against the wall beside him before Bucky’s head shot up off the carpet. If possible, his eyes were even more wild than before when he fixed them on Steve, full of the deepest betrayal. Then he very slowly dragged them sideways to see the man he’d just been panicking over. Sam gave him a very friendly smile.

“Depends on your frame of reference,” he admitted. “I’d say sizeable.”

“Nnnggggg.”

“Hi Buck.”

“Ggnnn.”

While Steve very poorly disguised a laugh behind one hand, Sam pushed off from the wall and sauntered further in to the living room. Bucky slammed his face back in to the carpet.

“Leave me here to die,” he pleaded in a very small voice. Sam tutted, reaching for the front door, only looking over his shoulder once he was halfway through it.

“Come on, Buck, can’t lick my cheekbones if you don’t get off the floor. It was a nice visit, Steve, but don’t be looking out your front curtains for a bit. I think I’ll let Bucky decide for himself what sizeable means.” He thanked god for the mercy of Steve’s house being situated out here so far from any other homes, surrounded on all sides by enough trees that you couldn’t see it from the road. A gorgeous little island of privacy. Sam was fairly sure he wasn’t the only one grateful for this, judging by the mad scrambling noises he could hear going on behind him.

Bucky’s voice garbled out something that sounded like ‘fuck you, thank you, bye forever’ and then Sam was listening to the slam of the front door barely a second before strong hands were wrapping themselves around his hips. He laughed even as Bucky’s face came in to view.

“Greatest assassin of several generations and you didn't notice my truck in the driveway?” he said.

“I may have been a bit distracted.” That was definitely a pout on Bucky’s lips.

“By being so hot for all of this”-Sam gestured vaguely down his own body-“that you literally ceased being able to function.”

He didn’t expect such easy agreement as the sheepish nod that followed his words. “Pretty much.”

Sam blinked slowly once, twice. For one long moment he considered teasing the man. Then he decided that their time was much better spent doing things they’d both obviously been wanting to do while assuming they would never get the chance.

“I was promised a tongue in my teeth. Are you gonna get to that any time soon or am I gonna sit here and pine some more for something I apparently could have had all along?”

Bucky keened piteously. Then he surged forward to follow through on his own promises and Sam really hoped that Steve had taken his words to heart about the curtains. The man was way too old to be seeing all the ways they were about to defile the side of this truck.

#rae writes #sambucky #winterfalcon #sam #bucky #steve #fanfiction #i'm not even really sorry either

[ordinaryschmuck]

What I Thought About "What If...T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?" from Marvel Studios' What If...

Salutations, random people on the internet who already scrolled past this! I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons!

You know, a lot of people lost so much when Chadwick Boseman died. His family has lost a husband and a father, his fans lost an inspiration, and to fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we lost both a hero and a king. His performance as T'Challa/Black Panther is by far the best the character has ever had, nailing the essence of the character while delivering so much more. So with the second episode of Marvel Studios' What If... one has to ask: Was Chadwick Boseman's final performance his best, or did the series failed to honor his legacy? Only spoilers can answer that question, so be wary as we analyze the second entry into Marvel's most ambitious series.

Now, let's review, shall we?

WHAT I LIKED

T’Challa himself: I enjoy that because his story has changed, so did T'Challa's personality. There's this sly cockiness that we've never seen from the character before, showing how much influence Yondu and his Ravagers had on him. And it's actually pretty fun seeing a character who was so calm and collected now act so...not that. With that said, just T'Challa is now Star-Lord, that doesn't mean he's a copy of Peter Quill.

The major differences lie in the impact that T'Challa left on the galaxy. Instead of stealing for himself, he chose to steal for planets in need as his own version of Robin Hood. And that, in turn, is a way more intriguing and compelling character to me than Peter Quill ever could be. There's just something about the nobleness of choosing to be a heroic outlaw instead of being strictly an outlaw. It proves that despite having his history altered drastically, there is no erasing that perfect and intelligent King that we all know and dearly miss. It sucks that we'll probably never see him again, but at least the last time we did it was to leave one epic impression for the fans.

Korath is T’Challa’s #1 Fan: Not what I would have expected, primarily since the character never acted so goofy, but I appreciate this change nonetheless. Because it's oddly wholesome seeing how much Korath admires T'Challa, to the point where he honestly believes that they're best friends. Also, it's funny. Like, really funny. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this version of Korath is the funniest character in this episode. He's just too good.

It’s All Funny: Hey, we're on the Guardians of the Galaxy side of the universe. I'd personally be offended if it didn't have a sense of humor.

Yondu: Yondu seems to be the only one who hasn't changed that much through T'Challa's presence. Sure, he went straight because of it, but personality-wise, he's still the same. He still gives off the energy as this king of the idiots when dealing with his Ravagers, and you how he's this thief with a heart of gold. It's just that only T'Challa brought it out more than Peter did. Other than that, I personally don't mind that not much has changed. Yondu was already a fun character, to begin with, so I'm more than alright seeing him unaltered if it means we get to witness more of him.

The Galaxy is Better Because of T’Challa’s Influence: No, really, it is. Drax still has his family, Thanos renounced his genocidal ways, and Nebula not only remained in one piece but even has hair...somehow. It's impressive to see just how better everything turned out, and, in a way, it's also kind of funny when you think about it. Like, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the universe was in shambles because of Peter's existence...but it wasn't really better either, and I can't help my chuckles when witnessing how better off things were because he stayed on Earth.

Thanos: Not much to say here. It's fun seeing how chilled out Thanos is when he's not hellbent on wiping out half the universe. And I definitely chuckled a couple times when people called him out on his genocidal bulls**t. It's pretty enjoyable and made me glad we got to see his very surprising return.

Nebula: But this shocked me more. Korath becoming a T'Challa stan? Sure. Thanos acting as a respectful ally? Whatever. But Nebula becoming T'Challa's sexy thieve-in-arms girlfriend?! I don't think anybody in their right mind would have predicted that!

But putting aside the shock, this version of Nebula was surprisingly entertaining. It's nice seeing what she would've acted like without the tragedy as she acts like she's free as a bird but still a little devious. Although, despite having a much better life, that doesn't mean there isn't animosity between her and Thanos. He may not have torn Nebula apart as much as he did in the universe we know, but take notice of how she still has cybernetics in her left eye. That shows that T'Challa didn't get to fix everything, and I appreciate that the writers hadn't glossed over how much of a bad father the Mad Titan is, just because he's all sunshine and rainbows now. It allows a chance for Thanos to prove he really did change and gives Nebula an arc to forgive him. And while the pacing for that could have been better, it's still somewhat believable for me to get behind it. Thus surprising me even more with how not only did Nebula make a phenomenal appearance, but one that left quite the impact on the story.

The Collector: It's not just better heroes that T'Challa created. The Collector, for example, somehow became a genuine threat in this timeline instead of that pathetic dweeb in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War. This again amazes me with how T'Challa miraculously created a buff-supervillain in his universe, where Peter did jack all. Maybe the galaxy really would have been better off without him...

Howard the Duck: This is the best way to utilize Howard the Duck if you ask me. He's a character that doesn't really scream "leading character" to me (unless given the correct type of writers), so it's better to let him stick to brief cameos and occasional supporting roles. It allows a goofy type of character to shine without causing audiences to roll their eyes over the idea of a talking duck saving the day.

Wakanda Theme Playing when T’Challa Found the Ship: It's just a cool callback. That's all.

Yondu Lying About Wakanda’s Destruction: A pretty solid reveal that shows how even though Yondu loves the kids he steals, he doesn't have the best intentions. What more can I add?

The Collector’s Wall of Weapons: The callbacks are nice, but I like implications from seeing Captain America's shield and Thor's hammer on that wall. It could mean that while the universe is a better place from T'Challa's influence, not everybody made it out alright.

Yondu’s Speech to T’Challa: I'm sure these beautiful and sentimental words have some implications toward Chadwick Boseman as an actor, but I was too busy being emotional to notice them. Well done.

What Happened to Peter Quill: Ok...I think we can just stop beating Peter down for dooming half the universe. Because how much lower can you get when finding out that this other guy practically saved everything with very little effort, only for you to end up as a worker at Dairy Queen? I'd honestly feel bad if I kept doing it at this point. The poor bastard…

(Sidenote: Love the implications that the world is still in danger because Ego still gets to Peter. It shows that despite the more interesting changes, not everything turns out all hunky-dory.)

The Tribute to Chadwick Boseman: A well-appreciated sentiment to cap off a perfect episode...or what would've been a perfect episode. 'Cause ya boy's got some nitpicks!

WHAT I DISLIKED

T’Challa Being Called Star-Lord: A small thing, but the reason why Peter called himself Star-Lord was because it was a nickname his mom called him. What's even the reasoning here? Because it makes no sense when you sit down and think.

The Black Order are still Boring: Out of all the improvements we've seen, it is still disappointing that these four remain as nothing more than cannon fodder for our heroes to go through before fighting the main boss. And pathetic. Immensely pathetic. I mean, for f**ks sake, THE MAW GOT KILLED BY THE PINK GIRL FROM GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY! Psychic powers and he still goes out like a b**ch!

Thanos Got Nerfed: The guy nearly killed the Avengers, with and without Infinity Stones, yet he can barely hold his own against these people who worked for him. C'MON NOW!

IN CONCLUSION

But those were just nitpicks. Despite them, I'd still consider this episode a solid A with 9.5/10. It was fun getting to see the changes T'Challa made to the galaxy, added with some pretty entertaining moments with other iconic characters. You couldn't have asked for a better final performance from Chadwick Boseman, and here's hoping that wherever he is, he knows that he shined brighter than any star in the galaxy.

#marvel studios' what if...? #marvel cinematic universe #mcu reviews #t'challa #t'challa star lord #yondu udonta #nebula #thanos #korath #what i thought about #what if reviews

[artycloudpop]

1hey are u bored at home, wanna chill and netflix....... but just can’t find some thing nice to watch? here’s a list of movies for u watch

A Ghost Story (2017)

Director David Lowery (Pete's Dragon) conceived this dazzling, dreamy meditation on the afterlife during the off-hours on a Disney blockbuster, making the revelations within even more awe-inspiring. After a fatal accident, a musician (Casey Affleck) finds himself as a sheet-draped spirit, wandering the halls of his former home, haunting/longing for his widowed wife (Rooney Mara). With stylistic quirks, enough winks to resist pretension (a scene where Mara devours a pie in one five-minute, uncut take is both tragic and cheeky), and a soundscape culled from the space-time continuum, A Ghost Story connects the dots between romantic love, the places we call home, and time -- a ghost's worst enemy.

Airplane! (1980)

This is one of the funniest movie of all time. Devised by the jokesters behind The Naked Gun, this disaster movie spoof stuffs every second of runtime with a physical gag (The nun slapping a hysterical woman!), dimwitted wordplay ("Don't call me, Shirley"), an uncomfortable moment of odd behavior ("Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), or some other asinine bit. The rare comedy that demands repeat viewings, just to catch every micro-sized joke and memorize every line.

A24

American Honey (2016)

Writer/director Andrea Arnold lets you sit shotgun for the travels of a group of wayward youth in American Honey, a seductive drama about a "mag crew" selling subscriptions and falling in and out of love with each other on the road. Seen through the eyes of Star, played by Sasha Lane, life on the Midwest highway proves to be directionless, filled with a stream of partying and steamy hookups in the backs of cars and on the side of the road, especially when she starts to develop feelings for Shia LaBeouf’s rebellious Jake. It’s an honest look at a group of disenfranchised young people who are often cast aside, and it’s blazing with energy. You’ll buy what they're selling.

Anna Karenina (2012)

Adapted by renowned playwright Tom Stoppard, this take on Leo Tolstoy's classic Russian novel is anything but stuffy, historical drama. Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander are all overflowing with passion and desire, heating up the chilly backdrop of St. Petersburg. But it's director Joe Wright's unique staging -- full of dance, lush costuming, fourth-wall-breaking antics, and other theatrical touches -- that reinvent the story for more daring audiences.

NETFLIX

Apostle (2018)

For his follow-up to his two action epics, The Raid and The Raid 2, director Gareth Evans dials back the hand-to-hand combat but still keeps a few buckets of blood handy in this grisly supernatural horror tale. Dan Stevens stars as Thomas Richardson, an early 20th century opium addict traveling to a cloudy island controlled by a secretive cult that's fallen on hard times. The religious group is led by a bearded scold named Father Malcolm (Michael Sheen) who may or may not be leading his people astray. Beyond a few bursts of kinetic violence and some crank-filled torture sequences, Evans plays this story relatively down-the-middle, allowing the performances, the lofty themes, and the windswept vistas to do the talking. It's a cult movie that earns your devotion slowly, then all at once.

Back to the Future (1985)

Buckle into Doc's DeLorean and head to the 1950s by way of 1985 with the seminal time-travel series that made Michael J. Fox a household name. It's always a joy watching Marty McFly's race against the clock way-back-when to ensure history runs its course and he can get back to the present. Netflix also has follow-up Parts II and III, which all add up to a perfect rainy afternoon marathon.

NETFLIX

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

The Coen brothers gave some big-name-director cred to Netflix by releasing their six-part Western anthology on the streaming service, and while it's not necessarily their best work, Buster Scruggs is clearly a cut above most Netflix originals. Featuring star turns from Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, and more, the film takes advantage of Netflix's willingness to experiment by composing a sort of death fugue that unfolds across the harsh realities of life in Manifest Destiny America. Not only does it revel in the massive, sweeping landscapes of the American West, but it's a thoughtful meditation on death that will reveal layer after layer long after you finish.

Barbershop (2002)

If you've been sleeping on the merits of the Barbershop movies, the good news is it's never too late to get caught up. Revisit the 2002 installment that started Ice Cube's smack-talking franchise so you can bask in Cedric the Entertainer's hilarious wisdom, enjoy Eve's acting debut, and admire this joyful ode to community.

NETFLIX

Barry (2016)

In 1981, Barack Obama touched down in New York City to begin work at Columbia University. As Barry imagines, just days after settling into his civics class, a white classmate confronts the Barry with an argument one will find in the future president's Twitter @-mentions: "Why does everything always got to be about slavery?" Exaltation is cinematic danger, especially when bringing the life of a then-sitting president to screen. Barry avoids hagiography by staying in the moment, weighing race issues of a modern age and quieting down for the audience to draw its own conclusions. Devon Terrell is key, steadying his character as smooth-operating, socially active, contemplative fellow stuck in an interracial divide. Barry could be any half-black, half-white kid from the '80s. But in this case, he's haunted by past, present, and future.

Being John Malkovich (1999)

You can't doubt the audacity of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Anomalisa), whose first produced screenplay hinged on attracting the title actor to a script that has office drones discovering a portal into his mind. John Cusack, Catherine Keener, and Cameron Diaz combine to create an atmosphere of desperate, egomaniacal darkness, and by the end you'll feel confused and maybe a little slimy about the times you've participated in celebrity gawking.

A24

The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017)

Two young women are left behind at school during break... and all sorts of hell breaks loose. This cool, stylish thriller goes off in some strange directions (and even offers a seemingly unrelated subplot about a mysterious hitchhiker) but it all pays off in the end, thanks in large part to the three leads -- Emma Roberts, Lucy Boynton, and Kiernan Shipka -- and director Oz Perkins' artful approach to what could have been just another occult-based gore-fest.

Bloodsport (1988)

Jean-Claude Van Damme made a career out of good-not-great fluff. Universal Soldier is serviceable spectacle, Hard Target is a living cartoon, Lionheart is his half-baked take on On the Waterfront. Bloodsport, which owes everything to the legacy of Bruce Lee, edges out his Die Hard riff Sudden Death for his best effort, thanks to muscles-on-top-of-muscles-on-top-of-muscles fighting and Stan Bush's "Fight to Survive." Magic Mike has nothing on Van Damme's chiseled backside in Bloodsport, which flexes its way through a slow-motion karate-chop gauntlet. In his final face-off, Van Damme, blinded by arena dust, rage-screams his way to victory. The amount of adrenaline bursting out of Bloodsport demands a splash zone.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Before he went punk with 2016's siege thriller Green Room, director Jeremy Saulnier delivered this low-budget, darkly comic hillbilly noir. When Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) discovers that the man who killed his parents is being released from prison, he returns home to Virginia to claims his revenge and things quickly spin out of control. Like the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, this wise-ass morality tale will make you squirm.

WELL GO USA ENTERTAINMEN

Burning (2018)

Some mysteries simmer; this one smolders. In his adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, writer and director Lee Chang-dong includes many elements of the acclaimed author's slyly mischievous style -- cats, jazz, cooking, and an alienated male writer protagonist all pop up -- but he also invests the material with his own dark humor, stray references to contemporary news, and an unyielding sense of curiosity. We follow aimless aspiring novelist Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) as he reconnects with Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), a young woman he grew up with, but the movie never lets you get too comfortable in one scene or setting. When Steven Yeun's Ben, a handsome rich guy with a beautiful apartment and a passion for burning down greenhouses, appears, the film shifts to an even more tremulous register. Can Ben be trusted? Yeun's performance is perfectly calibrated to entice and confuse, like he's a suave, pyromaniac version of Tyler Durden. Each frame keeps you guessing.

Cam (2018)

Unlike the Unfriended films or this summer's indie hit Searching, this web thriller from director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei isn't locked into the visual confines of a computer screen. Though there's plenty of online screen time, allowing for subtle bits of commentary and satire, the looser style allows the filmmakers to really explore the life and work conditions of their protagonist, rising cam girl Alice (Madeline Brewer). We meet her friends, her family, and her customers. That type of immersion in the granular details makes the scarier bits -- like an unnerving confrontation in the finale between Alice and her evil doppelganger -- pop even more.

THE ORCHARD

Creep (2014)

Patrick Brice's found-footage movie is a no-budget answer to a certain brand of horror, but saying more would give away its sinister turns. Just know that the man behind the camera answered a Craigslist ad to create a "day in the life" video diary for Josef (Mark Duplass), who really loves life. Creep proves that found footage, the indie world's no-budget genre solution, still has life, as long as you have a performer like Duplass willing to go all the way.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Armando Iannucci, the brilliant Veep creator, set his sights on Russia with this savage political satire. Based on a graphic novel, the film dramatizes the madcap, maniacal plots of the men jostling for power after their leader, Joseph Stalin, keels over. From there, backstabbing, furious insults, and general chaos unfolds. Anchored by performances from Shakespearean great Simon Russell Beale and American icon Steve Buscemi, it's a pleasure to see what the rest of the cast -- from Star Trek: Discovery's Jason Isaacs to Homeland's Rupert Friend -- do with Iannucci's eloquently brittle text.

Den of Thieves (2018)

If there's one thing you've probably heard about this often ridiculous bank robbery epic, it's that it steals shamelessly from Michael Mann's crime saga Heat. The broad plot elements are similar: There's a team of highly-efficient criminals led by a former Marine (Pablo Schreiber) and they must contend with a obsessive, possibly unhinged cop (Gerard Butler) over the movie's lengthy 140 minute runtime.  A screenwriter helming a feature for the first time, director Christian Gudegast is not in the same league as Mann as a filmmaker and Butler, sporting unflattering tattoos and a barrel-like gut, is hardly Al Pacino. But everyone is really going for it here, attempting to squeeze every ounce of Muscle Milk from the bottle.

NETFLIX

Divines (2016)

Thrillers don't come much more propulsive or elegant than Houda Benyamina's Divines, a heartwarming French drama about female friendship that spirals into a pulse-pounding crime saga. Rambunctious teenager Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and her best friend Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) begin the film as low-level shoplifters and thieves, but once they fall into the orbit of a slightly older, seasoned drug dealer named Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), they're on a Goodfellas-like trajectory. Benyamina offsets the violent, gritty genre elements with lyrical passages where Dounia watches her ballet-dancer crush rehearse his routines from afar, and kinetic scenes of the young girls goofing off on social media. It's a cautionary tale told with joy, empathy, and an eye for beauty.

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

Eddie Murphy has been waiting years to get this movie about comedian and blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore made, and you can feel his joy in finally getting to play this role every second he's on screen. The film, directed by Hustle & Flow's Craig Brewer, charts how Moore rose from record store employee, to successful underground comedian, to making his now-cult classic feature Dolemite by sheer force of passion. It's thrilling (and hilarious) to watch Murphy adopt Moore's Dolemite persona, a swaggering pimp, but it's just as satisfying to see the former SNL star capture his character at his lowest points. He's surrounded by an ensemble that matches his infectious energy.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

As romanticized as adolescence can be, it’s hard being young. Following the high school experience of troubled, overdramatic Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), The Edge of Seventeen portrays the woes of adolescence with a tender, yet appropriately cheeky tone. As if junior year isn’t hellish enough, the universe essentially bursts into flames when Nadine finds out her best friend is dating her brother; their friendship begins to dissolve, and she finds the only return on young love is embarrassment and pain. That may all sound like a miserable premise for a young-adult movie, except it’s all painfully accurate, making it endearingly hilarious -- and there’s so much to love about Steinfeld’s self-aware performance.

FOCUS FEATURES

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Romance and love are nothing without the potential for loss and pain, but most of us would probably still consider cutting away all the worst memories of the latter. Given the option to eradicate memories of their busted relationship, Jim Carrey's Joel and Kate Winslet's Clementine go through with the procedure, only to find themselves unable to totally let go. Science fiction naturally lends itself to clockwork mechanisms, but director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman never lose the human touch as they toy with the kaleidoscope of their characters' hearts and minds.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Before Bruce Campbell's Ash was wielding his chainsaw-arm in Army of Darkness and on Starz's Ash Vs. Evil Dead, he was just a good looking guy hoping to spend a nice, quiet vacation in a cabin with some friends. Unfortunately, the book of the dead had other plans for him. With this low-budget horror classic, director Sam Raimi brings a surprising degree of technical ingenuity to bear on the splatter-film, sending his camera zooming around the woods with wonder and glee. While the sequels double-downed on laughs, the original Evil Dead still knows how to scare.

The Firm (1993)

The '90s were a golden era of sleek, movie-star-packed legal thrillers, and they don't get much better than director Sydney Pollack's The Firm. This John Grisham adaptation has a little bit of everything -- tax paperwork, sneering mobsters, and Garey Busey, for starters -- but there's one reason to watch this movie: the weirdness of Tom Cruise. He does a backflip in this movie. What else do you need to know?

A24

The Florida Project (2017)

Sean Baker's The Florida Project nuzzles into the swirling, sunny, strapped-for-cash populace of a mauve motel just within orbit of Walt Disney World. His eyes are Moonee, a 6-year-old who adventures through abandoned condos, along strip mall-encrusted highway, and across verdant fields of overgrown brush like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. But as gorgeous as the everything appears -- and The Florida Project looks stunning -- the world around here is falling apart, beginning with her mother, an ex-stripper turning to prostitution. The juxtaposition, and down-to-earth style, reconsiders modern America in the most electrifying way imaginable.

Frances Ha (2012)

Before winning hearts and Oscar nominations with her coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig starred in the perfect companion film, about an aimless 27-year-old who hops from New York City to her hometown of Sacramento to Paris to Poughkeepsie and eventually back to New York in hopes of stumbling into the perfect job, the perfect relationship, and the perfect life. Directed by Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories), and co-written by both, Frances Ha is a measured look at adult-ish life captured the kind of intoxicating black and white world we dream of living in.

NETFLIX

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019)

Everyone's favorite disaster of a festival received not one, but two streaming documentaries in the same week. Netflix's version has rightly faced some criticism over its willingness to let marketing company Fuck Jerry off the hook (Jerry Media produced the doc), but that doesn't take away from the overall picture it portrays of the festival's haphazard planning and the addiction to grift from which Fyre's founder, Billy McFarland, apparently suffers. It's schadenfreude at its best.

Gerald's Game (2017)

Like his previous low-budget Netflix-released horror release, Hush, a captivity thriller about a deaf woman fighting off a masked intruder, Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation of Gerald's Game wrings big scares from a small location. Sticking close to the grisly plot details of King's seemingly "unfilmable" novel, the movie chronicles the painstaking struggles of Jessie Burlingame (Carla Gugino) after she finds herself handcuffed to a bed in an isolated vacation home when her husband, the titular Gerald, dies from a heart attack while enacting his kinky sexual fantasies. She's trapped -- and that's it. The premise is clearly challenging to sustain for a whole movie, but Flanagan and Gugino turn the potentially one-note set-up into a forceful, thoughtful meditation on trauma, memory, and resilience in the face of near-certain doom.

A24

Good Time (2017)

In this greasy, cruel thriller from Uncut Gems directors the Safdie brothers, Robert Pattinson stars as Connie, a bank robber who races through Queens to find enough money to bail out his mentally disabled brother, who's locked up for their last botched job. Each suffocating second of Good Time, blistered by the neon backgrounds of Queens, New York and propelled by warped heartbeat of Oneothrix Point Never's synth score, finds Connie evading authorities by tripping into an even stickier situation.

Green Room (2015)

Green Room is a throaty, thrashing, spit-slinging punk tune belted through an invasion-movie microphone at max volume. It's nasty -- and near-perfect. As a band of 20-something rockstars recklessly defend against a neo-Nazi battalion equipped with machetes, shotguns, and snarling guard dogs, the movie blossoms into a savage coming-of-age tale, an Almost Famous for John Carpenter nuts. Anyone looking for similar mayhem should check out director Jeremy Saulnier's previous movie, the low-budget, darkly comic hillbilly noir, Blue Ruin, also streaming on Netflix.

The Guest (2014)

After writer-director Adam Wingard notched a semi-sleeper horror hit with 2011's You're Next, he'd earned a certain degree of goodwill among genre faithful and, apparently, with studio brass. How else to explain distribution for his atypical thriller The Guest through Time Warner subsidiary Picturehouse? Headlined by soon-to-be megastar Dan Stevens and kindred flick It Follows' lead scream queen Maika Monroe, The Guest introduces itself as a subtextual impostor drama, abruptly spins through a blender of '80s teen tropes, and ultimately reveals its true identity as an expertly self-conscious straight-to-video shoot 'em up, before finally circling back on itself with a well-earned wink. To say anymore about the hell that Stevens' "David" unleashes on a small New Mexico town would not only spoil the fun, but possibly get you killed.

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

The Hateful Eight (2015)

Quentin Tarantino has something to say about race, violence, and American life, and it's going to ruffle feathers. Like Django Unchained, the writer-director reflects modern times on the Old West, but with more scalpel-sliced dialogue, profane poetry, and gore. Stewed from bits of Agatha Christie, David Mamet, and Sam Peckinpah, The Hateful Eight traps a cast of blowhards (including Samuel L. Jackson as a Civil War veteran, Kurt Russell as a bounty hunter known as "The Hangman," and Jennifer Jason Leigh as a psychopathic gang member) in a blizzard-enveloped supply station. Tarantino ups the tension by shooting his suffocating space in "glorious 70mm." Treachery and moral compromise never looked so good.

High Flying Bird (2019)

High Flying Bird is a basketball film that has little to do with the sport itself, instead focusing on the behind-the-scenes power dynamics that play out during an NBA lockout. At the center of the Steven Soderbergh movie -- shot on an iPhone, because that's what he does now -- is André Holland's Ray Burke, a sports agent trying to protect his client's interests while also disrupting a corrupt system. It's not an easy tightrope to walk, and, as you might expect, the conditions of the labor stoppage constantly change the playing field. With his iPhone mirroring the NBA's social media-heavy culture, and appearances from actual NBA stars lending the narrative heft, Soderbergh experiments with Netflix's carte blanche and produces a unique film that adds to the streaming service's growing list of original critical hits.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Hugo (2011)

Martin Scorsese hit pause on mob violence and Rolling Stones singles to deliver one of the greatest kid-centric films in eons. Following Hugo (Asa Butterfield) as he traces his own origin story through cryptic automaton clues and early 20th-century movie history, the grand vision wowed in 3-D and still packs a punch at home.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)

A meditative horror flick that's more unsettling than outright frightening, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House follows the demise of Lily, a live-in nurse (Ruth Wilson) who's caring for an ailing horror author. As Lily discovers the truth about the writer's fiction and home, the lines between the physical realm and the afterlife blur. The movie's slow pacing and muted escalation might frustrate viewers craving showy jump-scares, but writer-director Oz Perkins is worth keeping tabs on. He brings a beautiful eeriness to every scene, and his story will captivate patient streamers. Fans should be sure to check out his directorial debut, The Blackcoat's Daughter.

NETFLIX

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017)

In this maniacal mystery, Ruth (Melanie Lynskey), a nurse, and her rattail-sporting, weapon-obsessed neighbor Tony (Elijah Wood) hunt down a local burglar. Part Cormac McCarthy thriller, part wacky, Will Ferrell-esque comedy, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a cathartic neo-noir about everyday troubles. Director Macon Blair's not the first person to find existential enlightenment at the end of an amateur detective tale, but he might be the first to piece one together from cussing octogenarians, ninja stars, Google montages, gallons of Big Red soda, upper-deckers, friendly raccoons, exploding body parts, and the idiocy of humanity.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

With a bullwhip, a leather jacket, and an "only Harrison Ford can pull this off" fedora, director Steven Spielberg invented the modern Hollywood action film by doing what he does best: looking backward. As obsessed as his movie-brat pal and collaborator George Lucas with the action movie serials of their youth, the director mined James Bond, Humphrey Bogart, Westerns, and his hatred of Nazis to create an adventure classic. To watch Raiders of the Lost Ark now is to marvel at the ingenuity of specific sequences (the boulder! The truck scene! The face-melting!) and simply groove to the self-deprecating comic tone (snakes! Karen Allen! That swordsman Indy shoots!). The past has never felt so alive.

Inside Man (2006)

Denzel Washington is at his wily, sharp, and sharply dressed best as he teams up once again with Spike Lee for this wildly entertaining heist thriller. He's an NYPD hostage negotiator who discovers a whole bunch of drama when a crew of robbers (led by Clive Owen) takes a bank hostage during a 24-hour period. Jodie Foster also appears as an interested party with uncertain motivations. You'll have to figure out what's going on several times over before the truth outs.

DRAFTHOUSE FILMS

The Invitation (2015)

This slow-burn horror-thriller preys on your social anxiety. The film's first half-hour, which finds Quarry's Logan Marshall-Green arriving at his ex-wife's house to meet her new husband, plays like a Sundance dramedy about 30-something yuppies and their relationship woes. As the minutes go by, director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer's Body) burrows deeper into the awkward dinner party, finding tension in unwelcome glances, miscommunication, and the possibility that Marshall-Green's character might be misreading a bizarre situation as a dangerous one. We won't spoil what happens, but let's just say this is a party you'll be telling your friends about.

Ip Man (2008)

There aren't many biopics that also pass for decent action movies. Somehow, Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen and director Wilson Yip made Ip Man (and three sequels!) based on the life of Chinese martial arts master Yip Kai-man, who famously trained Bruce Lee. What's their trick to keeping this series fresh? Play fast and loose with the facts, up the melodrama with each film, and, when in doubt, cast Mike Tyson as an evil property developer. The fights are incredible, and Yen's portrayal of the aging master still has the power to draw a few tears from even the most grizzled tough guy.

NETFLIX

The Irishman (2019)

Opening with a tracking shot through the halls of a drab nursing home, where we meet a feeble old man telling tall tales from his wheelchair, The Irishman delights in undercutting its own grandiosity. All the pageantry a $150 million check from Netflix can buy -- the digital de-aging effects, the massive crowd scenes, the shiny rings passed between men -- is on full display. Everything looks tremendous. But, like with 2013's The Wolf of Wall Street, the characters can't escape the fundamental spiritual emptiness of their pursuits. In telling the story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and truck driver turned mob enforcer and friend to labor leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian construct an underworld-set counter-narrative of late 20th century American life. Even with a 209 minute runtime, every second counts.

It Comes at Night (2017)

In this post-apocalyptic nightmare-and-a-half, the horrors of humanity, the strain of chaotic emotions pent up in the name of survival, bleed out through wary eyes and weathered hands. The setup is blockbuster-sized -- reverts mankind to the days of the American frontier, every sole survivor fights to protect their families and themselves -- but the drama is mano-a-mano. Barricaded in a haunted-house-worthy cabin in the woods, Paul (Edgerton) takes in Will (Abbott) and his family, knowing full well they could threaten his family's existence. All the while, Paul's son, Trevor, battles bloody visions of (or induced by?) the contagion. Shults directs the hell out of every slow-push frame of this psychological thriller, and the less we know, the more confusion feels like a noose around our necks, the scarier his observations become.

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Jupiter Ascending is one of those "bad" movies that might genuinely be quite good. Yes, Channing Tatum is a man-wolf and Mila Kunis is the princess of space and bees don't sting space royalty and Eddie Redmayne hollers his little head off about "harvesting" people -- but what makes this movie great is how all of those things make total, absolute sense in the context of the story. The world the Wachowskis (yes, the Wachowskis!) created is so vibrant and strange and exciting, you almost can't help but get drawn in, even when Redmayne vamps so hard you're afraid he's about to pull a muscle. (And if you're a ballet fan, we have some good news for you.)

Jurassic Park (1993)

Perhaps the only movie that ever truly deserved a conversion to a theme-park ride, Steven Spielberg's thrilling adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel brought long-extinct creatures back to life in more ways than one. Benevolent Netflix gives us more than just the franchise starter, too: The Lost World and JP3 sequels are also available, so you can make a marathon of it.

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

Killing Them Softly (2012)

Brad Pitt doesn't make conventional blockbusters anymore -- even World War Z had epidemic-movie ambitions -- so it's not surprising that this crime thriller is a little out there. Set during the financial crisis and presidential election of 2008, the film follows Pitt's hitman character as he makes sense of a poker heist gone wrong, leaving a trail of bodies and one-liners along the way. Mixed in with the carnage, you get lots of musings about the economy and American exceptionalism. It's not subtle -- there's a scene where Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn do heroin while the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" plays -- but, like a blunt object to the head, it gets the job done.

Lady Bird (2017)

The dizzying, frustrating, exhilarating rite of passage that is senior year of high school is the focus of actress Greta Gerwig's first directorial effort, the story of girl named Lady Bird (her given name, in that "it’s given to me, by me") who rebels against everyday Sacramento, California life to obtain whatever it is "freedom" turns out to be. Laurie Metcalf is an understated powerhouse as Lady Bird's mother, a constant source of contention who doggedly pushes her daughter to be successful in the face of the family's dwindling economic resources. It's a tragic note in total complement to Gerwig's hysterical love letter to home, high school, and the history of ourselves.

A24

The Lobster (2016)

Greek style master Yorgos Lanthimos' dystopian allegory against romance sees Colin Farrell forced to choose a partner in 45 days or he'll be turned into an animal of his choice, which is a lobster. Stuck in a group home with similarly unlucky singles, Farrell's David decides to bust out and join other renegades in a kind of anti-love terror cell that lives in the woods. It's part comedy of manners, part futuristic thriller, and it looks absolutely beautiful -- Lanthimos handles the bizarre premise with grace and a naturalistic eye that reminds the viewer that humans remain one of the most interesting animals to exist on this planet.

Mad Max (1979)

Before Tom Hardy was grunting his way through the desert and crushing tiny two-headed reptiles as Max Rockatansky, there was Mel Gibson. George Miller's 1979 original introduces the iconic character and paints the maximum force of his dystopian mythology in a somewhat more grounded light -- Australian police factions, communities, and glimmers of hope still in existence. Badass homemade vehicles and chase scenes abound in this taut, 88-minute romp. It's aged just fine.

Magic Mike (2012)

Steven Soderbergh's story of a Tampa exotic dancer with a heart of gold (Channing Tatum) has body-rolled its way to Netflix. Sexy dance routines aside, Mike's story is just gritty enough to be subversive. Did we mention Matthew McConaughey shows up in a pair of ass-less chaps?

The Master (2012)

Loosely inspired by the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard -- Dianetics buffs, we strongly recommend Alex Gibney's Going Clear documentary as a companion piece -- The Master boasts one of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest performances, as the enigmatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd. Joaquin Phoenix burns just as brightly as his emotionally stunted, loose-cannon protege Freddie Quell, who has a taste for homemade liquor. Paul Thomas Anderson’s cerebral epic lends itself to many different readings; it’s a cult story, it's a love story, it's a story about post-war disillusionment and the American dream, it's a story of individualism and the desire to belong. But the auteur's popping visuals and heady thematic currents will still sweep you away, even if you’re not quite sure where the tide is taking you.

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The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017)

When Danny (Adam Sandler), Matthew (Ben Stiller) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), three half-siblings from three different mothers, gather at their family brownstone in New York to tend to their ailing father (Dustin Hoffman), a lifetime of familial politics explode out of every minute of conversation. Their narcissistic sculptor dad didn't have time for Danny. Matthew was the golden child. Jean was weird… or maybe disturbed by memories no one ever knew. Expertly sketched by writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) this memoir-like portrait of lives half-lived is the kind of bittersweet, dimensional character comedy we're now used to seeing told in three seasons of prestige television. Baumbach gives us the whole package in two hours.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The legendary British comedy troupe took the legend of King Arthur and offered a characteristically irreverent take on it in their second feature film. It's rare for comedy to hold up this well, but the timelessness of lines like, "I fart in your general direction!" "It's just a flesh wound," and "Run away!" makes this a movie worth watching again and again.

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Moonlight (2016)

Chronicling the boyhood years, teenage stretch, and muted adult life of Chiron, a black gay man making it in Miami, this triptych altarpiece is at once hyper-specific and cosmically universal. Director Barry Jenkins roots each moment in the last; Chiron's desire for a lost lover can't burn in a diner booth over a bottle of wine without his beachside identity crisis years prior, blurred and violent, or encounters from deeper in his past, when glimpses of his mother's drug addiction, or the mentoring acts of her crack supplier, felt like secrets delivered in code. Panging colors, sounds, and the delicate movements of its perfect cast like the notes of a symphony, Moonlight is the real deal, a movie that will only grow and complicate as you wrestle with it.

Mudbound (2017)

The South's post-slavery existence is, for Hollywood, mostly uncharted territory. Rees rectifies the overlooked stretch of history with this novelistic drama about two Mississippi families working a rain-drenched farm in 1941. The white McAllans settle on a muddy patch of land to realize their dreams. The Jacksons, a family of black sharecroppers working the land, have their own hopes, which their neighbors manage to nurture and curtail. To capture a multitude of perspectives, Mudbound weaves together specific scenes of daily life, vivid and memory-like, with family member reflections, recorded in whispered voice-over. The epic patchwork stretches from the Jackson family dinner table, where the youngest daughter dreams of becoming a stenographer, to the vistas of Mississippi, where incoming storms threaten an essential batch of crops, to the battlefields of World War II Germany, a harrowing scene that will affect both families. Confronting race, class, war, and the possibility of unity, Mudbound spellbinding drama reckons with the past to understand the present.

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My Happy Family (2017)

At 52, Manana (Ia Shughliashvili) packs a bag and walks out on her husband, son, daughter, daughter's live-in boyfriend, and elderly mother and father, all of whom live together in a single apartment. The family is cantankerous and blustery, asking everything of Manana, who spends her days teaching better-behaved teenagers about literature. But as Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß's striking character study unfolds, the motivation behind Manana's departure is a deeper strain of frustration, despite what her brother, aunts, uncles, and anyone else who can cram themselves into the situation would like us to think. Anchored by Ia Shughliashvili's stunningly internal performance, and punctured by a dark sense of humor akin to Darren Aronofsky's mother! (which would have been the perfect alternate title), My Happy Family is both delicate and brutal in its portrayal of independence, and should get under the skin of anyone with their own family drama.

The Naked Gun (1988)

The short-lived Dragnet TV spoof Police Squad! found a second life as The Naked Gun action-comedy movie franchise, and the first installment goes all in on Airplane! co-star Leslie Nielsen's brand of straight-laced dementia. Trying to explain The Naked Gun only makes the stupid sound stupider, but keen viewers will find jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes. It's the kind of movie that can crack "nice beaver," then pass a stuffed beaver through the frame and actually get away with it. Nielsen has everything to do with it; his Frank Drebin continues the grand Inspector Clouseau tradition in oh-so-'80s style.

The Notebook (2004)

"If you’re a bird, I’m a bird." It's a simple statement and a declaration of devotion that captures the staying power of this Nicholas Sparks classic. The film made Ryan Gosling a certified heartthrob, charting his working class character Noah's lovelorn romance with Rachel McAdam's wealthy character Allie. The star-crossed lovers narrative is enough to make even the most cynical among us swoon, but given that their story is told through an elderly man reading (you guessed it!) a notebook to a woman with dementia, it hits all of the tragic romance benchmarks to make you melt. Noah's commitment to following his heart -- and that passionate kiss in the rain -- make this a love story for the ages.

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Okja (2017)

This wild ride, part action heist, part Miyazaki-like travelogue, and part scathing satire, is fueled by fairy tale whimsy -- but the Grimm kind, where there are smiles and spilled blood. Ahn Seo-hyun plays Mija, the young keeper of a "super-pig," bred by a food manufacturer to be the next step in human-consumption evolution. When the corporate overlords come for her roly-poly pal, Mija hightails it from the farm to the big city to break him out, crossing environmental terrorists, a zany Steve Irwin-type (Gyllenhaal), and the icy psychos at the top of the food chain (including Swinton's childlike CEO) along the way. Okja won't pluck your heartstrings like E.T., but there's grandeur in its frenzy, and the film's cross-species friendship will strike up every other emotion with its empathetic, eco-friendly, and eccentric observations.

On Body and Soul (2017)

This Hungarian film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, and it's easy to see why. The sparse love story begins when two slaughterhouse employees discover they have the same dream at night, in which they're both deer searching the winter forest for food. Endre, a longtime executive at the slaughterhouse, has a physically damaged arm, whereas Maria is a temporary replacement who seems to be on the autism spectrum. If the setup sounds a bit on-the-nose, the moving performances and the unflinching direction save On Body and Soul from turning into a Thomas Aquinas 101 class, resulting in the kind of bleak beauty you can find in a dead winter forest.

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The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Don't go into Orson Welles' final film expecting it to be an easy watch. The Other Side of the Wind, which follows fictional veteran Hollywood director Jake Hannaford (tooootally not modeled after Welles himself) and his protegé (also tooootally not a surrogate for Welles' own friend and mentee Peter Bogdanovich, who also plays the character) as they attend a party in celebration of Hannaford's latest film and are beset on all sides by Hannaford's friends, enemies, and everyone in between. The film, which Welles hoped would be his big comeback to Hollywood, was left famously unfinished for decades after his death in 1985. Thanks to Bogdanovich and producer Frank Marshall, it was finally completed in 2018, and the result is a vibrant and bizarre throwback to Welles' own experimental 1970s style, made even more resonant if you know how intertwined the movie is with its own backstory. If you want to dive even deeper, Netflix also released a documentary about the restoration and completion of the film, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which delves into Welles' own complicated and tragic relationship with Hollywood and the craft of moviemaking.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Guillermo Del Toro’s dark odyssey Pan’s Labyrinth takes a fantasy setting to mirror the horrible political realities of the human realm. Set in 1940s Falangist Spain, the film documents the hero’s journey of a young girl and stepdaughter of a ruthless Spanish army officer as she seeks an escape from her war-occupied world. When a fairy informs her that her true destiny may be as the princess of the underworld, she seizes her chance. Like Alice in Wonderland if Alice had gone to Hell instead of down the rabbit hole, the Academy Award-winning film is a wondrous, frightening fairy tale where that depicts how perilous the human-created monster of war can be.

Paranormal Activity (2007)

This documentary-style film budgeted at a mere $15,000 made millions at the box office and went on to inspire a number of sequels, all because of how well its scrappiness lent to capturing what feels like a terrifying haunted reality. Centered on a young couple who is convinced an evil spirit is lurking in their home, the two attempt to capture its activity on camera, which, obviously, only makes their supernatural matters worse. It leans on found footage horror tropes made popular by The Blair Witch Project and as it tessellates between showing the viewer what’s captured on their camcorders and the characters’ perspectives, it’s easy to get lost in this disorienting supernatural thriller.

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Poltergeist (1982)

If you saw Poltergeist growing up, chances are you’re probably equally as haunted by Heather O’Rourke as she is in the film, playing a little girl tormented by ghosts in her family home. This Steven Spielberg-penned, Tobe Hooper-directed (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) paranormal flick is a certified cult classic and one of the best horror films of all time, coming from a simple premise about a couple whose home is infested with spirits obsessed with reclaiming the space and kidnapping their daughter. Poltergeist made rearranged furniture freaky, and you may remember a particularly iconic scene with a fuzzed out vintage television set. It’s may be nearly 40 years old, but the creepiness holds up.

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Taking Jane Austen's literary classic and tricking it out with gorgeous long takes, director Joe Wright turns this tale of manners into a visceral, luminescent portrait of passion and desire. While Succession's Matthew MacFadyen might not make you forget Colin Firth from 1995's BBC adaptation, Keira Knightley is a revelation as the tough, nervy Lizzie Bennett. With fun supporting turns from Donald Sutherland, Rosamund Pike, and Judi Dench, it's a sumptuous period romance that transports you from the couch to the ballroom of your dreams -- without changing out of sweatpants.

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Private Life (2018)

Over a decade since the release of her last dark comedy, The Savages, writer and director Tamara Jenkins returned with a sprawling movie in the same vein: more hyper-verbal jerks you can't help but love. Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) are a Manhattan-dwelling couple who have spent the last few years attempting to have a baby with little success. When we meet them, they're already in the grips of fertility mania, willing to try almost anything to secure the offspring they think they desire. With all the details about injections, side effects, and pricey medical procedures, the movie functions as a taxonomy of modern pregnancy anxieties, and Hahn brings each part of the process to glorious life.

The Ritual (2018)

The Ritual, a horror film where a group of middle-aged men embark on a hiking trip in honor of a dead friend, understands the tension between natural beauty of the outdoors and the unsettling panic of the unknown. The group's de facto leader Luke (an understated Rafe Spall) attempts to keep the adventure from spiralling out of control, but the forest has other plans. (Maybe brush up on your Scandinavian mythology before viewing.) Like a backpacking variation on Neil Marshall's 2005 cave spelunking classic The Descent, The Ritual deftly explores inter-personal dynamics while delivering jolts of other-worldly terror. It'll have you rethinking that weekend getaway on your calendar.

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Roma (2018)

All those billions Netflix spent paid off in the form of several Oscar nominations for Roma, including one for Best Picture and a win for Best Director. Whether experienced in the hushed reverence of a theater, watched on the glowing screen of a laptop, or, as Netflix executive Ted Sarandos has suggested, binged on the perilous surface of a phone, Alfonso Cuarón's black-and-white passion project seeks to stun. A technical craftsman of the highest order, the Children of Men and Gravity director has an aesthetic that aims to overwhelm -- with the amount of extras, the sense of despair, and the constant whir of exhilaration -- and this autobiographical portrait of kind-hearted maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) caring for a family in the early 1970s has been staged on a staggering, mind-boggling scale.

Schindler's List (1993)

A passion project for Steven Spielberg, who shot it back-to-back with another masterpiece, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who reportedly saved over 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Frank, honest, and stark in its depiction of Nazi violence, the three-hour historical drama is a haunting reminder of the world's past, every frame a relic, every lost voice channeled through Itzhak Perlman's mourning violin.

A Serious Man (2009)

This dramedy from the Coen brothers stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics professor who just can't catch a break, whether it's with his wife, his boss, or his rabbi. (Seriously, if you're having a bad day, this airy flick gives you ample time to brood and then come to the realization that your life isn't as shitty as you think.) Meditating on the spiritual and the temporal, Gopnik's improbable run of bad luck is a smart modern retelling of the Book of Job, with more irony and fewer plagues and pestilences. But not much fewer.

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Shadow (2019)

In Shadow, the visually stunning action epic from Hero and House of Flying Daggers wuxia master Zhang Yimou, parasols are more than helpful sun-blockers: They can be turned into deadly weapons, shooting boomerang-like blades of steel at oncoming attackers and transforming into protective sleds for traveling through the slick streets. These devices are one of many imaginative leaps made in telling this Shakespearean saga of palace intrigue, vengeance, and secret doppelgangers set in China's Three Kingdoms period. This is a martial arts epic where the dense plotting is as tricky as the often balletic fight scenes. If the battles in Game of Thrones left you frustrated, Shadow provides a thrilling alternative.

She's Gotta Have It (1986)

Before checking out Spike Lee's Netflix original series of the same name, be sure to catch up with where it all began. Nola (Tracy Camilla Johns) juggles three men during her sexual pinnacle, and it's all working out until they discover one another. She's Gotta Have It takes some dark turns, but each revelation speaks volumes about what real romantic independence is all about.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The late director Jonathan Demme's 1991 film is the touchstone for virtually every serial killer film and television show that came after. The iconic closeup shots of an icy, confident Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as he and FBI newbie Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) engage in their "quid pro quo" interrogation sessions create almost unbearable tension as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) remains on the loose, killing more victims. Hopkins delivers the more memorable lines, and Buffalo Bill's dance is the stuff of nerve-wracking anxiety nightmares, but it's Foster's nuanced performance as a scared, determined, smart-yet-hesitant agent that sets Silence of the Lambs apart from the rest of the serial killer pack.

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and David O. Russell’s first collaboration -- and the film that turned J-Law into a bona fide golden girl -- is a romantic comedy/dramedy/dance-flick that bounces across its tonal shifts. A love story between Pat (Cooper), a man struggling with bipolar disease and a history of violent outbursts, and Tiffany (Lawrence), a widow grappling with depression, who come together while rehearsing for an amateur dance competition, Silver Linings balances an emotionally realistic depiction of mental illness with some of the best twirls and dips this side of Step Up. Even if you're allergic to rom-coms, Lawrence and Cooper’s winning chemistry will win you over, as will this sweet little gem of a film: a feel-good, affecting love story that doesn’t feel contrived or treacly.

Sin City (2005)

Frank Miller enlisted Robert Rodriguez as co-director to translate the former's wildly popular series of the same name to the big screen, and with some added directorial work from Quentin Tarantino, the result became a watershed moment in the visual history of film. The signature black-and-white palette with splashes of color provided a grim backdrop to the sensational violence of the miniaturized plotlines -- this is perhaps the movie that feels more like a comic than any other movie you'll ever see.

Sinister (2012)

Horror-movie lesson #32: If you move into a creepy new house, do not read the dusty book, listen to the decaying cassette tapes, or watch the Super 8 reels you find in the attic -- they will inevitably lead to your demise. In Sinister, a true-crime author (played by Ethan Hawke) makes the final mistake, losing his mind to home movies haunted by the "Bughuul."

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Small Crimes (2017)

It's always a little discombobulating to see your favorite Game of Thrones actors in movies that don't call on them to fight dragons, swing swords, or at least wear some armor. But that shouldn't stop you from checking out Small Crimes, a carefully paced thriller starring the Kingslayer Jaime Lannister himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. As Joe Denton, a crooked cop turned ex-con, Coster-Waldau plays yet another character with a twisted moral compass, but here he's not part of some mythical narrative. He's just another conniving, scheming dirtbag in director E.L. Katz's Coen brothers-like moral universe. While some of the plot details are confusing -- Katz and co-writer Macon Blair skimp on the exposition so much that some of the dialogue can feel incomprehensible -- the mood of Midwestern dread and Coster-Waldau's patient, lived-in performance make this one worth checking out. Despite the lack of dragons.

Snowpiercer (2013)

Did people go overboard in praising Snowpiercer when it came out? Maybe. But it's important to remember that the movie arrived in the sweaty dog days of summer, hitting critics and sci-fi lovers like a welcome blast of icy water from a hose. The film's simple, almost video game-like plot -- get to the front of the train, or die trying -- allowed visionary South Korean director Bong Joon-ho to fill the screen with excitement, absurdity, and radical politics. Chris Evans never looked more alive, Tilda Swinton never stole more scenes, and mainstream blockbuster filmmaking never felt so tepid in comparison. Come on, ride the train!

The Social Network (2010)

After making films like Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac, director David Fincher left behind the world of scumbags and crime for a fantastical, historical epic in 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The Social Network was another swerve, but yielded his greatest film. There's no murder on screen, but Fincher treats Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg like a dorky, socially awkward mob boss operating on an operatic scale. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire, screwball-like dialogue burns with a moral indignation that Fincher's watchful, steady-handed camera chills with an icy distance. It's the rare biopic that's not begging you to smash the "like" button.

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

In this shrewd twist on the superhero genre, the audience's familiarity with the origin story of your friendly neighborhood web-slinger -- the character has already starred in three different blockbuster franchises, in addition to countless comics and cartoon TV adaptations -- is used as an asset instead of a liability. The relatively straight-forward coming-of-age tale of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a Brooklyn teenager who takes on the powers and responsibilities of Spider-Man following the death of Peter Parker, gets a remix built around an increasingly absurd parallel dimension plotline that introduces a cast of other Spider-Heroes like Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glen), and, most ridiculously, Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), a talking pig in a Spider-Suit. The convoluted set-up is mostly an excuse to cram the movie with rapid-fire jokes, comic book allusions, and dream-like imagery that puts the rubbery CGI of most contemporary animated films to shame.

Spotlight (2015)

Tom McCarthy stretches the drama taut as he renders Boston Globe's 2000 Catholic Church sex scandal investigation into a Hollywood vehicle. McCarthy's notable cast members crank like gears as they uncover evidence and reflect on a horrifying discovery of which they shoulder partial blame. Spotlight was the cardigan of 2015's Oscar nominees, but even cardigans look sharp when Mark Ruffalo is involved.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

No movie captures the prolonged pain of divorce quite like Noah Baumbach's brutal Brooklyn-based comedy The Squid and the Whale. While the performances from Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as bitter writers going through a separation are top-notch, the film truly belongs to the kids, played by Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline, who you watch struggle in the face of their parents' mounting immaturity and pettiness. That Baumbach is able to wring big, cathartic laughs from such emotionally raw material is a testament to his gifts as a writer -- and an observer of human cruelty.

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Starship Troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven is undoubtedly the master of the sly sci-fi satire. With RoboCop, he laid waste to the police state with wicked, trigger-happy glee. He took on evil corporations with Total Recall. And with Starship Troopers, a bouncy, bloody war picture, he skewered the chest-thumping theatrics of pro-military propaganda, offering up a pitch-perfect parody of the post-9/11 Bush presidency years before troops set foot in Iraq or Afghanistan. Come for the exploding alien guts, but stay for the winking comedy -- or stay for both! Bug guts have their charms, too.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

You might think a movie that opens with a suicidal man riding a farting corpse like a Jet Ski wears thin after the fourth or fifth flatulence gag. You would be wrong. Brimming with imagination and expression, the directorial debut of Adult Swim auteurs "The Daniels" wields sophomoric humor to speak to friendship. As Radcliffe's dead body springs back to life -- through karate-chopping, water-vomiting, and wind-breaking -- he becomes the id to Dano's struggling everyman, who is also lost in the woods. If your childhood backyard adventures took the shape of The Revenant, it would look something like Swiss Army Man, and be pure bliss.

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Tallulah (2016)

From Orange Is the New Black writer Sian Heder, Tallulah follows the title character (played by Ellen Page) after she inadvertently "kidnaps" a toddler from an alcoholic rich woman and passes the child off as her own to appeal to her run-out boyfriend's mother (Allison Janney). A messy knot of familial woes and wayward instincts, Heder's directorial debut achieves the same kind of balancing act as her hit Netflix series -- frank social drama with just the right amount of humorous hijinks. As Tallulah grows into a mother figure, her on-the-lam parenting course only makes her more and more of a criminal in the eyes of... just about everyone. You want to root for her, but that would be too easy.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Travis Bickle (a young Bobby De Niro) comes back from the Vietnam War and, having some trouble acclimating to daily life, slowly unravels while fending off brutal insomnia by picking up work as a... taxi driver... in New York City. Eventually he snaps, shaves his hair into a mohawk and goes on a murderous rampage while still managing to squeeze in one of the most New York lines ever captured on film ("You talkin' to me?"). It's not exactly a heartwarmer -- Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old prostitute -- but Martin Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver is a movie in the cinematic canon that you'd be legitimately missing out on if you didn't watch it.

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The Theory of Everything (2014)

In his Oscar-winning performance, Eddie Redmayne portrays famed physicist Stephen Hawking -- though The Theory of Everything is less of a biopic than it is a beautiful, sweet film about his lifelong relationship with his wife, Jane (Felicity Jones). Covering his days as a young cosmology student ahead of his diagnosis of ALS at 21, through his struggle with the illness and rise as a theoretical scientist, this film illustrates the trying romance through it all. While it may be written in the cosmos, this James Marsh-directed film that weaves in and out of love will have you experience everything there is to feel.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson found modern American greed in the pages of Upton Sinclair's depression-era novel, Oil!. Daniel Day-Lewis found the role of a lifetime behind the bushy mustache of Daniel Plainview, thunderous entrepreneur. Paul Dano found his milkshake drunk up. Their discoveries are our reward -- There Will Be Blood is a stark vision of tycoon terror.

Time to Hunt (2020)

Unrelenting in its pursuit of scenarios where guys point big guns at each other in sparsely lit empty hallways, the South Korean thriller Time to Hunt knows exactly what stylistic register it's playing in. A group of four friends, including Parasite and Train to Busan break-out Choi Woo-shik, knock over a gambling house, stealing a hefty bag of money and a set of even more valuable hard-drives, and then find themselves targeted by a ruthless contract killer (Park Hae-soo) who moves like the T-1000 and shoots like a henchmen in a Michael Mann movie. There are dystopian elements to the world -- protests play out in the streets, the police wage a tech-savvy war on citizens, automatic rifles are readily available to all potential buyers -- but they all serve the simmering tension and elevate the pounding set-pieces instead of feeling like unnecessary allegorical padding. Even with its long runtime, this movie moves.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

If a season of 24 took place in the smoky, well-tailored underground of British intelligence crica 1973, it might look a little like this precision-made John le Carré adaptation from Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson. Even if you can't follow terse and tightly-woven mystery, the search for Soviet mole led by retired operative George Smiley (Gary Oldman), the ice-cold frames and stellar cast will suck you into the intrigue. It's very possible Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch are reading pages of the British phone book, but egad, it's absorbing. A movie that rewards your full concentration.

To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)

Of all the entries in the rom-com revival, this one is heavier on the rom than the com. But even though it won't make your sides hurt, it will make your heart flutter. The plot is ripe with high school movie hijinks that arise when the love letters of Lara Jean Covey (the wonderful Lana Condor) accidentally get mailed to her crushes, namely the contractual faux relationship she starts with heartthrob Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo). Like its heroine, it's big-hearted but skeptical in all the right places.

Total Recall (1990)

Skip the completely forgettable Colin Farrell remake from 2012. This Arnold Schwarzenegger-powered, action-filled sci-fi movie is the one to go with. Working from a short story by writer Philip K. Dick, director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) uses a brain-teasing premise -- you can buy "fake" vacation memories from a mysterious company called Rekall -- to stage one of his hyper-violent, winkingly absurd cartoons. The bizarre images of life on Mars and silly one-liners from Arnold fly so fast that you'll begin to think the whole movie was designed to be implanted in your mind.

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Tramps (2017)

There are heists pulled off by slick gentlemen in suits, then there are heists pulled off by two wayward 20-somethings rambling along on a steamy, summer day in New York City. This dog-day crime-romance stages the latter, pairing a lanky Russian kid (Callum Tanner) who ditches his fast-food register job for a one-off thieving gig, with his driver, an aloof strip club waitress (Grace Van Patten) looking for the cash to restart her life. When a briefcase handoff goes awry, the pair head upstate to track down the missing package, where train rides and curbside walks force them to open up. With a laid-back, '70s soul, Tramps is the rare doe-eyed relationship movie where playing third-wheel is a joy.

Uncut Gems (2019)

In Uncut Gems, the immersive crime film from sibling director duo Josh and Benny Safdie, gambling is a matter of faith. Whether he's placing a bet on the Boston Celtics, attempting to rig an auction, or outrunning debt-collecting goons at his daughter's high school play, the movie's jeweler protagonist Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) believes in his ability to beat the odds. Does that mean he always succeeds? No, that would be absurd, undercutting the character's Job-like status, which Sandler imbues with an endearing weariness that holds the story together. But every financial setback, emotional humbling, and spiritual humiliation he suffers gets interpreted by Howard as a sign that his circumstances might be turning around. After all, a big score could be right around the corner.

Velvet Buzzsaw (2018)

Nightcrawler filmmaker Dan Gilroy teams up with Jake Gyllenhaal again to create another piece of cinematic art, this time a satirical horror film about the exclusive, over-the-top LA art scene. The movie centers around a greedy group of art buyers who come into the possession of stolen paintings that, unbeknownst to them, turn out to be haunted, making their luxurious lives of wheeling and dealing overpriced paintings a living hell. Also featuring the likes of John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Billy Magnussen, and others, Velvet Buzzsaw looks like Netflix’s next great original.

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Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

Oscar-baiting, musician biopics became so cookie-cutter by the mid-'00s that it was easy for John C. Reilly, Judd Apatow, and writer-director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) to knot them all together for the ultimate spoof. Dewey Cox is part Johnny Cash, part Bob Dylan, part Ray Charles, part John Lennon, part anyone-you-can-think-of, rising with hit singles, rubbing shoulders with greats of many eras, stumbling with eight-too-many drug addictions, then rising once again. When it comes to relentless wisecracking, Walk Hard is like a Greatest Hits compilation -- every second is gold.

The Witch (2015)

The Witch delivers everything we don't see in horror today. The backdrop, a farm in 17th-century New England, is pure misty, macabre mood. The circumstance, a Puritanical family making it on the fringe of society because they're too religious, bubbles with terror. And the question, whether devil-worshipping is hocus pocus or true black magic, keeps each character on their toes, and begging God for answers. The Witch tests its audience with its (nearly impenetrable) old English dialogue and the (anxiety-inducing) trials of early American life, but the payoff will keep your mind racing, and your face hiding under the covers, for days.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Before taking us to space with Gravity, director Alfonso Cuarón steamed up screens with this provocative, comedic drama about two teenage boys (Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal) road-trippin' it with an older woman. Like a sunbaked Jules and Jim, the movie makes nimble use of its central love triangle, setting up conflicts between the characters as they move through the complicated political and social realities of Mexican life. It's a confident, relaxed film that's got an equal amount of brains and sex appeal. Watch this one with a friend -- or two.

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Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher's period drama is for obsessives. In telling the story of the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who captured the public imagination by sending letters and puzzles to the Bay Area press, the famously meticulous director zeroes in on the cops, journalists, and amateur code-breakers who made identifying the criminal their life's work. With Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist-turned-gumshoe Robert Graysmith at the center, and Robert Downey Jr.'s barfly reporter Paul Avery stumbling around the margins, the film stretches across time and space, becoming a rich study of how people search for meaning in life. Zodiac is a procedural thriller that makes digging through old manilla folders feel like a cosmic quest.

13th (2016)

Selma director Ava DuVernay snuck away from the Hollywood spotlight to direct this sweeping documentary on the state of race in America. DuVernay's focus is the country's growing incarceration rates and an imbalance in the way black men and women are sentenced based on their crimes. Throughout the exploration, 13th dives into post-Emancipation migration, systemic racism that built in the early 20th century, and moments of modern political history that continue to spin a broken gear in our well-oiled national machine. You'll be blown away by what DuVernay uncovers in her interview-heavy research.

20th Century Women (2016)

If there's such thing as an epistolary movie, 20th Century Women is it. Touring 1970s Santa Barbara through a living flipbook, Mike Mills's semi-autobiographical film transcends documentation with a cast of wayward souls and Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), an impressionable young teenager. Annette Bening plays his mother, and the matriarch of a ragtag family, who gather together for safety, dance to music when the moment strikes, and teach Jamie the important lesson of What Women Want, which ranges from feminist theory to love-making techniques. The kid soaks it up like a sponge. Through Mills's caring direction, and characters we feel extending infinitely through past and present, so do we.

for more cool stuff life this, follow my page an send me a message for suggestions and queries

[popcornbutterflymedia]

I LOVE YOU HATER is like a burst of sunshine on a gloomy day, and a rain shower that cleanses the heart which allows for clarity. it is a story about truth - an individual’s sense of truth, relationship to the truth, how this truth is shaped, and how this truth is upheld or manipulated, according to one’s needs. this is also the journey to love, through one’s journey to authenticity. this is one of those movies that, if I missed, I didn’t think would matter. I am glad I gave it a chance and it would be a shame if this wouldn’t be given a chance.

to understand the genius of this movie is to have an idea of the audience reaction inside the cinema: people were laughing out loud line after line, the audience of mostly seniors were surprisingly kilig when they were supposed to be, and the crying, the sniffling, the heaving were all preciously audible. this, to me is the funniest romcom when it was a romcom, and one of the most deeply touching family dramas, when it became such, that I have seen yet.

joshua garcia pretending to be beki is enough of a comic selling point for me. frankly him in anything is enough for me, but the subtlety with which he played his straight man pretending to be gay, the guilt and everything that comes with it, is still surprising. I understand why he said this was the hardest character for him to play, the nuances are no joke, but he still played it so effortlessly.

this is julia barretto her most liberated. ever since she began I have been waiting for something from her, I couldn’t quite figure out what it is. this is it. she was fearless and vulnerable, and brave. and my heart was filled with joy for her.

I was so ready to call this a joshlia movie with Kris as a trigger, granted no one else could play sasha like she does, but there was one moment she owned, and it changed my mind.

kudos also go to markki stroem and mark neumann for the equally subtle portrayals of gay guys in a relationship.

when it was announced that this movie was going to be direk Giselle’s, I did not know what to make of it, only because LIT wasn’t enough for me to recognize her perspective. the magic of this movie is in the details, and the details are what direk giselle is a genius at - the direction (hello, ‘straight guy in the eyes, while being beki everywhere else), the camera angles, the shots, the editing. it’s all so seamless. see this movie has a very simple premise, that could do away with very simple cinematic treatment, but direk giselle respected every moment of the film, that she made an extraordinary experience out of simple moments. 

now, my favorite moments of the movie (this is hard, because every moment is memorable) the airport scene, gosh that hurt, beki josh, julia’s grand entrance, her energy, the manila pictorial, julia and her moment with al tantay (simple, quiet, but got to me badly). paete, takahan, (my laguna roots thank you for that), josh and ronaldo valdez, kris and ronaldo valdez, basically anything ronaldo valdez is in. i lost it. the confrontation between julia’s and josh’s characters - julia shocked me into intimidation. who i saw was an actress i always wanted her to be, an actress i always believed she could be. she wears her legacy well, but dare i say she could grow to be better than that legacy. i am so happy for her in this movie. and joshua, that boy continues to amaze me - from the boy that confused me to the boy i am actually personally proud of. 

the plot works because all the characters are mirrors of, and are necessary for each other. this is generally speaking, but the perfect illustration of this is when joko and zoe met up with john's character: in that silent moment when josh was looking at john while he was speaking, we knew john's character was speaking for josh's character's sentiments, that both characters are on parallel journeys. it's also clear that joko needed zoe to learn the value of the truth, and zoe needed joko to understand the sense of family. and sasha needed  and gave something to the youngsters: she gave zoe her wisdom through experience and she needed joko's connection with his own dad to get through her dad. I can here ms van's voice. in order for the story to be effective, a character must need something that the other character has. not verbatim. as a writer, you usually ask yourself what do your characters need from each other?

a few notes: i’d read a critique on the movie about its plot, being questionable, kulang(?) now, it would have mattered if this was a plot driven movie, but this is a character driven movie. it’s about a set of people who will choose to carry on, despite the incompleteness, the open-endedness of their circumstances. how to say this without spoilers? i wanted zoe to stick it to one character. i selfishly needed that confrontation. this movie, you see is as much about forgiveness, and i personally think forgiveness is impossible without ownership. and to own an experience, a feeling, a history, we must find words for it, and the people who are responsible for that history, or whatever pain they have caused, ought to hear about it. i am not looking for a fight, just a moment to speak, and be heard, but ms van’s post reminded me that the heart of this movie is forgiveness as self liberation, and the ability to love in spite of it all. through this lens that that open ending is perfect. this movie made me so happy, so hopeful, and by hearing certain lines, healed too. at a time when i am constantly wondering where my heart has gone, at a time when i have to hide my heart on purpose, and silence my voice, sometimes, this movie reminded me that i do have both - a heart and a voice. congratulations @v_r_v (this movie has got me wondering, what a joshlia movie penned entirely by you, much like eily was for lizquen, would look like. :) ), the entire team, (i don’t know their ig handles, sorry), and everyone at @starcinema. my heart has nothing but love and gratitude for you and all that you do.❤ @micodelrosario1

#film #film: i love you hater #actor: joshua garcia #actress: julia barretto #team up: joshua garcia and julia barretto #joshlia #director: giselle andres

[thenatureofnarrative]

Best Films of 2020

The basis of my annual list is simple, these are the films that were, for me, mesmerizing and memorable. These were the cinematic experiences that either provoked a depth of emotion and/or provided a whole lot to talk about. These are the films that I could not forget and I cannot wait to see again. 

After you read this year’s list, you can also find last year’s list here, and if you’d like to watch an epic conversation about the best films of the year I encourage you (or dare you) to watch this video. You can also follow me and my reviews on Letterboxd. 

1. Time

Time is a documentary that doesn’t feel like a documentary, but rather sets itself apart as a transcendent piece of visual poetry about the perseverance and devotion of family in the face of injustice. This film is so many different things, and yet is one cohesive lyrical experience. This is a story about love and commitment. This is a story about parenthood and motherhood. This is a story about the forgotten and the voiceless, those discounted and discarded by an oppressive and racist system of incarceration. And this is a story about repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. Time is an 80-minute cinematic experience that beautifully and seamlessly ties all these threads together, through the singular voice and expressions of wife and mother, Fox Rich. I’m telling you, you’ve never seen or heard a film like this before. The way it’s shot, the way it sounds, the way it’s cut together, and the way it lets us linger and just sit with this woman and her family as they wait, but most importantly, as they persevere and fight for the release of their husband and father. Time is a masterpiece, and I can’t wait to watch it again and share it with others. On Amazon Prime.

2. First Cow

First Cow, Kelly Reichardt's masterpiece, was the most unexpected cinematic experience of the year for me, and I'm not even quite sure why. Maybe it was because I had heard such strange things about this film? Maybe it was because I've never actually seen any of Reichardt's previous films (though I am well aware of them)? And maybe it was because I genuinely didn't know what it was about? Whatever the reason(s) may be, I was truly captivated by the charming sincerity of this simple historical tale. In the first half-hour, the cinematography and production design was giving me made-for-TV-Canadian-heritage-moment vibes; and I don't mean that as an insult. I didn't know what to make of this film at first. It was like - - The Oregon Trail: The Movie - - which made me feel nostalgic and all the more intrigued. But this is Kelly Reichardt's genius: an unexpected, perfectly paced and plotted tale. I mean, sincerely, this film is the perfect example of how a story should unfold, of how the pieces of a narrative should be laid, and how the rug can get pulled out from under you at the end. Even though I didn't feel particularly emotional while watching the film, it was the ending - - Good Lord - - that ending! I mean, I was putty in Reichardt's hands. She got me. She totally got me, and I loved it! How foolish of me to think the final act would become something else, how susceptible and satisfied I was when, in the end, the story was pure and true. And that's all I'm going to say about it, because you need to see this film. On Crave-HBO and Rental Services. 

3. Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee’s latest offering of cinematic greatness is less a work of protest and more a re-education. With Da 5 Bloods, history is given a voice, those oppressed and ignored now share the stage and their stories. At this point in his illustrious career it’s almost hard to believe that Spike Lee can still surprise us, but with Da 5 Bloods he masterfully and brilliantly blends together multiple cinematic styles and genres; and deserves an Oscar for it. Through the reunion of four Vietnam vets, who return to Ho Chi Minh in search of the lost remains of their fallen squad leader, an unbelievably heartfelt, exciting, and at times, shocking, story is told. A story that defies convention and summation; a film that genuinely has to be seen to be believed. For its entire two and a half hour runtime, we are never bored, always engaged. Some might accuse this film of trying to be too many things, but two transcendent performances keep us anchored through it all. Unnervingly, Chadwick Boseman plays a small role as the departed squad leader, appearing in flashbacks and as an apparition to one man. This one man is, Paul, played by Delroy Lindo, who portrays this grief-stricken and traumatized protagonist with staggering strength; and deserves an Oscar for it (though some suspect his departed co-star might win posthumously for another film). Nevertheless, Da 5 Bloods is a memorable and meaningful work of art and an essential education. On Netflix.

4. Judas and the Black Messiah

While watching Judas and the Black Messiah, I couldn’t help but draw lines of comparison between it and The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020). Both films are award-worthy pieces of penmanship. Both films are brimming with award-worthy performances. The distinction is, however, that TTOTC7 is a terrific piece of entertainment, while JATBM is an important work of history. Director Shaka King has carefully crafted, not only a captivating piece of cinema, but a necessary education about the historical efforts of the Black Panthers and the cyclical-social struggle of standing against injustice while resisting the influences of political coercion and moral corruption. And while Daniel Kaluuya, as a true thespian, gives a commanding and courageous performance, I believe the work of both, LaKeith Stanfield and Dominique Fishback, deserve more attention and award consideration. Their performances brought a depth of soul and struggle that was especially agonizing to watch during the film’s conclusion because not a single person in this story is a caricature. These are real people with real motivations living out the truest of conflicts: the preservation of power vs. justice for the oppressed. On Rental Services.

5. The Trial of the Chicago 7

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a terrific piece of entertainment. This true story, adapted and directed by Aaron Sorkin, is expertly written and structured, condensing a complicated six-month trial into a brisk and captivating two hours. For some, the story’s brevity is a cause for concern, but for me, in terms of cinema, I could not escape the momentum all three acts uniquely displayed, effectively intercutting several testimonies so that we would feel the chaos and uncertainty of the proceedings. Across the board the cast is incredible, but I believe it’s John Carroll Lynch, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II who are most worthy of award recognition. And yet, we cannot ignore the necessity of a fully-embodied antagonist, performed perfectly here by the great Frank Langella. The truth is, TTOTC7, doesn’t work without Langella’s performance. In the hands of another actor, Judge Hoffman could have come off as cartoonish, because his behaviour and actions seem so unrealistic and unbelievable, but thankfully, due to Langella’s craft and care, we do believe it, and it makes us angry for all the right reasons. Nevertheless, in the end, TTOTC7, isn’t a perfect film, but it is a great one. On Netflix.

6. Possessor 

You probably shouldn’t watch this film. Fair warning. It is extremely graphic and violent, and yet, profound in its artistry and themes. The visuals are both simple and mysterious; clever and confounding. Possessor is a story that forces you to confront the frailty of the human condition, both physically and psychologically, and consider how easily influenced our sense of being and identity can be. While watching this film I couldn’t help but think how aptly equipped filmmaker, Brandon Cronenberg, would be to direct the next Christopher Nolan screenplay. Their themes and skills would be a perfect match. Young Cronenberg (son of David Cronenberg) is a remarkable director and provides us with some of the year’s best cinematography; along with another terrific performance from my favourite “young” actor, Christopher Abbott. On Crave-HBO and Rental Services.

7. Soul

Pixar’s Soul is a masterful, moving, and unpredictable work of art. This may not be a film for the youngest ones, but it is for the young at heart, or more specifically, those whose hearts are in a middling crisis of some sort. On the macro-level, there is absolutely nothing generic about this film. Whether in a spiritual plane or a material one, everything on screen is detailed and nuanced. From the philosophical and ontological, to the cultural and vocational, every audience member is invited to experience a universal narrative through a very specific lens; and there is tremendous power in that. Even though, in the Pixar family, Soul might be a stylistic cousin of Coco or Inside Out, and explore a narrative arc similar to Woody’s experience in the Toy Story films, it still sets itself apart as a work of Ecclesiastes. This is the sort of artistic confrontation one needs when dreams and passions are no longer sufficient, and one’s calling is no longer a pursuit of something unattained but a present embrace of an already unfolding narrative. Soul is a profound and beautiful work of art. On Disney+ and Rental Services.

8. The Climb

The Climb was one of the biggest surprises of the year for me, and the funniest film of 2020. Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin have crafted a hilarious and wildly entertaining portrayal of friendship; fiercely loyal, desperately-co-dependent, backstabbing friendship. And while the story may not explore any great psychological depths, no scene in this brisk roller coaster is wasted. Every sequence is an elaborately choreographed vignette, a clever and creative single-take or “oner.” And even though the visual craftsmanship might strike some as excessive, I found it elevated the excitement and unpredictable nature of the story. From opening sequence to touching conclusion, The Climb, is a surprising and side-splitting comedy about enduring friendship, a story of despicable people doing despicable things in hilarious ways. On Rental Services.

9. Horse Girl

Horse Girl is a surprising film, with a truly stunning and subversive narrative. Alison Brie has always been a strong performer, but her performance in this film is award-worthy, and has sadly been overlooked this year. In the first half-hour we are charmed by Horse Girl. For those of us who love Duplass productions, or quirky films about lonely people, we are easily won over at first, but then this story takes a serious turn and we realize we’re watching a shockingly poignant portrayal of mental illness. Nothing is taken for granted or included without careful consideration in this story. Everything, every scene and every interaction, draws us in and allows us to experience the symptoms and disillusionment of a loved one losing their grip on reality. It’s heart-breaking. It’s harrowing. It’s tenderly rendered. My only wish while watching was for a more intricate or visually complex composition. Nevertheless, Jeff Baena’s Horse Girl is still a terrific achievement and one worth typing into the search bar. On Netflix.

10. The Father

The Father is a stunning achievement in directing and editing, especially when you consider it as a first-time feature, from an artist adapting their own stage play. This is a heartbreaking, harrowing, deeply empathetic portrayal of dementia and mental illness, as we experience it through eyes and mind of the afflicted. In a single apartment, every doorway and room is a different memory or time in one's life, and even though our protagonist appears to be in a familiar space, they cannot grab hold of the present. It’s almost scary how realistic Anthony Hopkins’ performance is. Both he and Olivia Coleman are fully embodied, and it’s devastating to watch. This film is a remarkable achievement. On Rental Services.

 Honourable Mentions (alphabetically):

The Devil All the Time: A masterclass in southern gothic storytelling; it’s bleak, dark and disturbing, and deeply compelling. On Netflix.

Extraction: A truly impeccable piece of action cinema, with just enough heart and soul to keep the story grounded. On Netflix.

Mank: A black and white talky-bio-pic about a Hollywood socialist who’s dependent upon millionaires that manipulate their audiences with familial metaphors and manufactured newsreels. Watch with subtitles. On Netflix.

Minari: A simple and sobering tale about familial struggle and heartache, with a striking deftness to each and every character, across the generations, from children to parents and grandparent. On Rental Services.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always: Every year there is one film, one story, that is so honest, vulnerable and raw, that it’s hard to watch and yet undeniably essential and important. This is that film. On Crave-HBO and Rental Services.

Nomadland: With more focus than a Terrence Malick film, and less obligation than a documentary, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland is a beautiful and innocent observation of our unknown neighbours. On Disney+.

One Night in Miami: The best ensemble of the year, with carefully crafted, fully embodied, sincere and nuanced performances from every cast member. On Amazon Prime.

Promising Young Woman: A unique and unpredictable thrill. Emerald Fennell’s award-worthy screenplay walks a tight-rope between black-comedy and revenge-thriller. On Rental Services.

Red, White and Blue: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of five films is a marvel, but Red, White and Blue is the cornerstone at the center of it all. On Amazon Prime.

Sound of Metal: A deeply affecting story about recovery, discovery and the stages of grief - - all explored through the experiences of our deaf protagonist. I wept through this one. On Rental Services. 

[junker-town]

AEW’s botched ‘explosion’ was a symptom of bigger problems

This will live in wrestling infamy for decades.

A battered, bloody Jon Moxley struggled in the ring, his hands cuffed behind his back. Air raid sirens blared as horrified announcers believed they were about to witness a man’s death. Then aid came from an unlikely source with 20 seconds remaining on a giant doomsday clock. Eddie Kingston, Moxley’s lifelong friend turned bitter enemy, rushed to the ring in an attempt to save his friend from a ring rigged with explosives and set to detonate. Knowing he couldn’t rescue Moxley in time he threw himself on top of Moxley, ready to accept his fate. The clock hit zero. This was it. Four limp fireworks that looked like sparklers sputtered from the ring posts, followed by some smoke and denotations that sounded like weak firecrackers.

The conclusion of AEW Revolution was unquestionably one of the funniest things to happen in professional wrestling history, and it was completely unintentional.

I expected bigger booms? pic.twitter.com/yApENMwoVm

— SkullsMedia.com (@SkullsMedia) March 8, 2021

There is no way this is what AEW planned for. It’s clear something went wrong with the pyro, leaving us with this weak, hilarious ending to the most hyped wrestling pay per view of the year. What was supposed to be a poignant and dramatic close to the story, one that would write Moxley off TV while he took paternity leave and set up questions about the future of Eddie Kingston instead left both men, the announce team, and everyone involved looking like fools.

AEW is trying to steer into the skid. After the show went off the air Moxley took the microphone and told the Jacksonville crowd that “Kenny Omega may be one tough son of a bitch, but he can’t make an exploding ring worth a shit.” The idea is that the AEW World Champion, who has been increasingly becoming like Wile E. Coyote in his quest to destroy Moxley, messed it all up, and the hilarious botch at the end of the show was somehow intentional. A valiant effort to turn the moment into comedy, but not enough considering the preceding show, which had incredible in-ring action got utterly overshadowed by impossible expectations AEW set and knew they couldn’t live up to.

Aside from the ludicrous “exploding barbed wire death match” main event to Revolution, the biggest selling point, the reason so many people decided to tune in, was a hugely-hyped new signing announcement we were told was a “hall of fame worthy talent,” sending expectations through the moon. Could Brock Lesnar jump ship to AEW? Would this mark the return of CM Punk to professional wrestling? Was this the moment a New Japan Pro Wrestling star would jump over to U.S. television with Kazuchika Okada, or Kota Ibushi debuting? No, it was Christian Cage.

Christian Cage HAS ARRIVED! Order #AEWRevolution now on all major providers, @brlive, and @FiteTV (international fans) pic.twitter.com/1KgXHLHtxR

— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) March 8, 2021

Technically Christian checks all the boxes. He’s unquestionably a big name, he’s definitely “hall of fame worthy,” but the problem is the unevenness of AEW’s announcements, and their pacing. The last huge signing the company made was poaching Paul Wight (aka “The Big Show”) from WWE, casually announcing it on Twitter on a sleepy Wednesday afternoon when nobody was expecting it. When you make that kind of move quietly, the expectation is through the moon when you hype a major signing for five days before a pay per view. Expectations of Lesnar or Punk may be unrealistic, but they were warranted in contrast to how casual AEW was with Wight.

Cage arriving to almost no fanfare, then leaving without saying a word just put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Then the botched “explosion” closing the show left the whole night feeling disappointing and sad, when it shouldn’t have been.

The biggest shame is that those two moments were so awful that they overshadowed what was otherwise a pretty stellar show. The Young Bucks vs. Chris Jericho and MJF was a masterclass is tag team wrestling when on paper it should have been mediocre. The tag team battle royale was sloppy, but exceedingly fun — especially in the close. The title match between Hikaru Shida and Ryo Mizunami was one of the best women’s matches AEW has put on PPV. Even the extremely hyped street fight that saw Sting return to the ring was brilliant, with swooping camera work and innovation that took the cinematic match to a new level.

Revolution won’t be remembered for any of that. The matches will fade into history and the indelible mark left by a show with so much promise will be a hilariously bad explosion that was the worst possible thing to happen at the worst possible time, an a lukewarm signing people predicted as their “worst case scenario.” There’s a lesson here that AEW has to learn about building and managing expectations. This isn’t the first time owner Tony Khan has over promised and under delivered on a big moment, and unless they do more to temper expectations it will turn people away from AEW. That’s how significant and terrible Sunday night was.

[aion-rsa]

Dog Soldiers: The Wild History of the Most Action Packed Werewolf Movie Ever Made

https://ift.tt/36IrB2A

There is no shortage of werewolf movies scattered across the century of horror cinema. Whether it’s the original lycanthropic classic The Wolf Man, which spawned the very first shared cinematic universe, or the genre’s still unmatched final form with 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, lycanthropes of all shapes and sizes have loped and howled their way into our hearts through the decades.

But even among those highlights, there’s a certain sameness to far too many werewolf movies: The tragic individual, the creeping dread as the full moon draws near, perhaps a prophecy detailing how the poor soul is doomed to kill even those they love the most when in the grip of the curse, the final fate involving something silver. You know how it goes.

But 2002’s Dog Soldiers dispenses with most of that, allowing the audience’s general pop culture knowledge of the genre to do the heavy lifting in service of something wilder, louder, and even stranger than what we’re usually accustomed to when werewolves are around. Instead of a movie about an individual laboring under the shadow of a curse, we get a whole pack of werewolves. And instead of that pack feasting on unsuspecting villagers or their loved ones, they’re up against a special forces unit, on a training exercise gone horribly wrong.

The result is one of the loudest, goriest, and unexpectedly funniest werewolf movies ever made.

Origin Story 

The origin of Dog Soldiers can be traced back to 1995, when director Neil Marshall and producer Keith Bell were involved in a small film production together.

“It was fairly chaotic and people weren’t getting paid and it was the classic ultra low budget deferment based kind of production,” Marshall recalls. “It was great as a learning experience and a first feature to be involved with, but it was clearly not a way forward as a going concern of making features for a living.’”

It was there that the pair “made a pact” to work together on a feature of their own, with Marshall directing and Bell producing, and that ended up being Marshall’s “soldiers versus werewolves” concept. Marshall had a first draft script by 1996.

“I’d always wanted to do a siege movie, war movie, or a military movie, and combine that with my love of horror,” Marshall says. He did exactly that. If you were to walk in late on Dog Soldiers and miss its opening scene, you might be forgiven for thinking you were watching a war movie, as a group of young soldiers engages in a training exercise with their hard-bitten sergeant. But as their training progresses, and their unit gets picked off one by one, the true nature of their foes begins to reveal itself, before finally devolving into full “siege movie” territory, with the last survivors locked in a cottage, trying to keep the circling pack of werewolves at bay.

Despite the fact that so many of its characters are dispatched (in increasingly gruesome fashion) in its first act, Dog Soldiers is a rare breed of horror movie in which there are no easy victims, and virtually every member of the ill-fated special forces unit is distinct and fun right from the outset.

“I think that’s ultimately what made the story so lasting,” Marshall says. “It wasn’t just some two dimensional characters being killed by werewolves. I wanted to make those soldiers completely believable.”

But to achieve that, they needed the right cast.

Rounding up the Troops

Because of its remote wooded setting, Dog Soldiers has no need for extras, and there are no unnecessary characters. But the keys to the film are Sgt. Harry G. Wells (Sean Pertwee), Pvt. Lawrence Cooper (Kevin McKidd), Capt. Richard Ryan (Davos Seaworth himself, Liam Cunningham), and the mysterious Megan (Emma Cleasby). These are the film’s final four standing (for a while at least), and the rising tension between them once they’re looked in the cottage in the woods is a highlight of the film. 

But the course of Dog Soldiers history could have been very different if some of the original casting had stayed in place. For one thing, the production had initially targeted Jason Statham for the role of Cooper.

“I’d seen him in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and I thought this guy’s got real charisma, he’s going to be a star, he’d be great for Cooper,” Marshall says. “He stuck with us for a little while, but then he got offered Ghosts of Mars. My advice to him was ‘We don’t know when we’re going to get to make this. You’ve got a chance to go and work with John Carpenter. Go and work with John Carpenter.’ He went off to the States and the rest is history.”

While casting what-ifs are always fun, it’s difficult to imagine Statham’s taciturn brooding having the same effect as the earnest forthrightness McKidd brought to the role of Cooper. But Statham wasn’t the only soon-to-be big name who almost made it into the film, as Marshall had offered the role of Spoon to Simon Pegg, long before the actor had his big screen breakout in Shaun of the Dead. And while Marshall describes his meeting with Pegg about the role as “charming and lovely,” the actor had already promised Edgar Wright that Shaun of the Dead would be his first film role. (Darren Morfitt, in his first film role, ended up a perfect fit for Spoon).

Despite losing two stars of this caliber, Marshall believes “the movie gods were on our side” throughout the casting process. Particularly with the arrival of Sean Pertwee as Sgt. Harry G. Wells. Pertwee had become aware of the project when a draft of the script was passed to him by none other than Jason Isaacs.  

“I didn’t quite get it initially because it was dense, the dialogue,” Pertwee recalls in a Zoom chat with Den of Geek. “The syntax was dense and I didn’t understand a lot of it. There was a stream of these characters’ consciousness which I then later realized, of course, was how the British army speak to each other, constantly jibing each other.”

A meeting between Pertwee and Marshall went well, and the actor offered his assistance with the project. 

Read more

Movies

13 Must-See Werewolf Movies

By Mike Cecchini

“I said, ‘Please use my name if that helps in any shape, way, or form,’ because I was working a lot at the time.” 

Three years later, he got the call that filming would begin in two weeks.

“Now you look back and you just cannot imagine anybody else in those roles,” Marshall says. “What we got was this ensemble group of more experienced actors, like Liam Cunningham and Sean Pertwee and Kevin McKidd and then less experienced actors like Chris Robson and Les Simpson and threw them all in the mix together and they became very nurturing to each other. They were looking at Sean as the boss of the squad, and he looked after the other guys. I swear by the end of the shoot, these guys would have fought and died for each other. They were so tight.”

Despite the challenges of filming in cold, rainy conditions in the woods, Pertwee looks back on the experience fondly.

“On our first day we did the very first scene where you see us all piling out of this helicopter. It was a 12-page scene and we did it virtually in one take,” Pertwee recalls. “You get to know each other very, very well on a first day when you’re nervous anyway, and you don’t know the people around you necessarily and you’re supposed to be emulating a crew, a unit of people that have been together for many years, and we did by the end of that. We went to the pub and drank lots of beer and the rest is history. We became a family from that day, and that was all down to Neil and his impeccable casting.”

Action Men

With its tightly-knit strike force of heavily armed soldiers as its central characters, like Predator or Aliens before it, Dog Soldiers is as much of an action movie as it is a horror film, and that was always key to Marshall’s approach.

“I think the movie that made me want to make movies in the first place wasn’t a horror movie, it was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is my all-time favorite movie,” Marshall says. “I think the thing that links together the films that I love and the films that I make and the films I want to make, is action more than horror. I try to find ways for playing action into whatever I’m doing, because I just love doing action stuff. So I knew I wanted to do an action horror film.”

To help keep that action as authentic as possible, there was a consultant on set who was a former French Foreign Legion servicemember, who “told us what we needed to know” as Pertwee put it.

Read more

Movies

Wolf: A Werewolf Movie With a Secret Identity

By Guy Buckland

Dog Soldiers was filmed somewhat chronologically, with the first half’s scenes in the woods shot before they moved to the werewolf house. Those outdoor shooting conditions may have helped the actors cement their onscreen chemistry.

“It was wet and muddy and at one of our locations you just couldn’t stand up in it,” Marshall says. “Everybody was falling over left, right, and center. It was Luxembourg in the winter. It was a bit grim, but I think it lends itself to the way the film looks, the quality of the film.”

Pertwee is more direct.

“We were in the shit, we were in the mire,” Pertwee says with a smile. “From the moment we jumped out of that helicopter we had 70-pound packs and SA80s and we were literally jumping around shooting…You never really were aware that the camera was there, so it was a lot of no acting required because it was just a question of being there.”

The Nature of the Beast

While the idea of “soldiers vs. werewolves” is a compelling enough pitch on its own, Marshall wanted to make sure he didn’t get pigeonholed as strictly a horror director, nor did he want to get caught up in too many of the traditional werewolf movie tropes.

“I didn’t want to make a ‘curse of the werewolf’ movie, which is pretty much what every werewolf movie prior to this has been…except potentially The Howling which doesn’t really kind of deal with that so much,” Marshall says. “So I wanted the werewolves just to be essentially like the enemy…like the equivalent of aliens in Alien or Predator or whatever.”

Of course, the movie isn’t completely devoid of traditional werewolf elements, such as the full moon (of course) or the vulnerability to silver, but even these inclusions were carefully thought out.

“There’re certain tropes that you want to put in there, but that I wanted to play around with,” Marshall says. “If it’s the night of a full moon, when does that actually happen? Does it work as soon as the full moon appears in the sky or when it comes out from behind a cloud? Because it’s still there even if it’s hiding behind a cloud. That’s when I came up with the idea that they’re compelled to change on the night of the full moon, but there’s not a specific time that happens and they can try to hold it back.” 

This of course plays out in a funny exchange between Kevin McKidd’s Pvt. Lawrence Cooper and Sean Pertwee’s Sgt. Harry Wells, describing it as “needing a piss…when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go.”

Dancing in the Moonlight

Even the werewolves themselves are unique among the genre. The werewolves of Dog Soldiers are disturbing, unnaturally tall, gangly figures with oversized lupine heads, rarely seen fully in frame for more than a few seconds at a time. It was all inspired by a sketch that a friend of Marshall’s brought to him.

“It was just this beautiful, almost elegant creature, rather than a big muscular lump…and it looked all very feminine,” Marshall says. “I took that idea and ran with it. When we were designing it even further it evolved a little bit along the way, but it stayed to that basic concept.”

Read more

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Katharine Isabelle on How Ginger Snaps Explored the Horror of Womanhood

By Rosie Fletcher

To add to the otherworldly, disturbing feel of the werewolves, Marshall hired dancers rather than stuntmen to fill the costumes. Of course, that led to its own unique challenges, especially since they had to wear stilts to account for their lupine leg extensions, which made them a little less graceful than that original sketch had promised.

“You come up with all these kinds of crazy ideas about putting dancers in costumes and things,” Marshall says. “They were on these foot tall stilts, which were really difficult to walk on. Then you’ve got to factor in the fact that when they’ve got the head on, they can’t see very well. All they can see is from a tiny little hole in the mouth of the werewolf. So they’re blind and staggering around on stilts. A lot of that grace kind of went out the window quite quickly as they tried to literally find their feet and learn how to move in the costumes.” 

Mercifully, they also filmed some shots of the werewolves from just the waist up, so the dancers weren’t required to perform on stilts the entire time. But the offbeat werewolf appearance had some unintended results on set, as well.

“I remember there was a scene with Kevin McKidd and I watching the lycanthropes coming out of the woods, and we just got the giggles because the poor guys in these suits were standing en pointe, almost like a ballerina stands on their toes,” Pertwee says. “They had these weird wooden-heeled leg things, but they were around their feet to give them the dog’s bow back leg, so it was incredibly uncomfortable. They couldn’t go to the bathroom because they were sealed in this neoprene style rubber with these huge heads on and they were staggering around. We got the giggles because it was not remotely terrifying.”

Pertwee had a different reaction during one of the movie’s most harrowing moments, shortly after his character had been disemboweled by one of them.

“I take nothing away from the skill of these young men that were doing this because it was so insanely uncomfortable and they never complained,” Pertwee says. “They were in these costumes literally 12 hours a day, really horrendous suffering from heat exhaustion and everything. They were in cramped spaces, they couldn’t see where they were going. But when I saw one looming over me, coming to get me when I was in the bed, it was like what nightmares are made of. It was terrifying. They were extraordinary performers, so my hat goes off to them.”

“Sausages”

If there’s a record for most gruesome and frequent depiction of entrails on film, Dog Soldiers would certainly be in the running for it. And to hear Pertwee tell it, the process of creating a convincing disemboweling seems only slightly less unpleasant than an actual disembowelment.

“I think they used some kind of intestinal skin, which they rammed full of sausage or something, which probably went off,” Pertwee says. “It smelled to high heaven, and  we’d break for lunch or whatever so they had to devise a way of holding my guts together. They built this cup kind of thing out of gaffer tape, which they strapped around me that I could put my guts in and then I’d sit down and have lunch with everyone.”

Read more

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

By David Crow

And then there’s all the blood to consider.

“I was covered in so much blood,” Pertwee says. “It was very cold where we were shooting, it was freezing in fact. We used sugar blood, which is this really visceral kind of thick thing, but whenever it gets cold it sticks. It got to the point that it was very uncomfortable both because of the smell of my sausages that had gone off, and I would take off my trousers and stand them in my trailer and overnight they’d still be standing, literally standing, because the blood had frozen. The worst thing was putting the trousers on every morning, I have to say. It was deeply unpleasant.”

Pertwee’s “sausages” lead to what might be the most memorable (and gruesome) scene in the film is when McKidd’s Pvt. Cooper and Cleasby’s Megan have to perform field surgery on Pertwee’s Sgt. Wells, after he has been disemboweled by a werewolf. With nothing but a small cottage bed, some field supplies, a little morphine, and a bottle of scotch, they have the unenviable task of putting Wells’ “sausages” back in their correct place.

Pertwee’s performance seems like a study in spontaneity, blending the sheer horrific agony of the situation with the unexpected humor that comes from a man deeply in shock while also intoxicated by a vast quantity of painkillers. It was Pertwee who suggested a little method acting to move things along.

“I was supposed to be whacked off my head on huge amounts of doses of morphine and drank a bottle of scotch,” Pertwee says. “I said to Neil, ‘Can we experiment with some alcohol,’ which of course is a big no-no on set. Of course, absolutely we would be able to do it sans alcohol, but we just thought it would add a different energy to it, so we gave it a go. We tried it and sorry, but I think it really worked.”

Or as the director recalls…

“Yeah, he’d taken the edge off, definitely,” Marshall says with a laugh. “And I think that allowed him to just get settled into it way more.”

The scene culminates in Cooper getting frustrated with Wells’ ranting and thrashing, and knocking him cold with a punch. But it turns out there’s a little more to even this fun moment.

“I’d love to say I remember but I don’t,” Pertwee says. “[Kevin] went to knock me out so he could glue my guts back in. But I turned the first time and I went, ‘No, not like that you pussy! Really knock me out!’ He was so exasperated he caught me on the end of my nose, and all I remember was just going down hitting the pillow and all the props guys were standing next to me…He had actually broken the end of my nose.”

The director knew right away that something had gone a little wrong.

“I just saw this blood splash across the wall. And I was thinking, ‘Hang on, that wasn’t in the script,’ but it was Sean’s blood.”

It’s one of many scenes in the film where the dialogue and interactions between the characters feels so completely natural, despite the fact that they’re in increasingly absurd and horrific situations.

“Certainly the operation scene was the most significantly improvised,” Marshall says. “The big learning experience for me with this movie was just working with a really solid cast of experienced actors for the first time in this kind of context. I’d spent six years planning this movie in my head, [and] I discovered on day one of working with these guys that all my plans went out the window because of course they’re amazing collaborators and they want to bring something to the table, and that doesn’t necessarily always fit with what you had in mind. So a lot of the scenes that were in my head, kind of static, suddenly became much more lively and interesting, especially within the house.”

Gallows Humor

In a movie that’s already full of characters who fire off quips and wisecracks in the face of death, there are also unexpected moments of humor that make their way in. But remarkably, none of it feels out of place. “I wanted all the humor to come out of the characters themselves, but also just some of the absurdity of the situation,” Marshall says.

Notably, the moment when Pvt. Cooper is helping to nail the door of the house shut and suddenly a werewolf’s hand bursts through the mail slot, prompting frantic, Looney Tunes-esque hammering at the werewolf’s fingers.

“If you’re hammering a nail and a werewolf pokes its fingers through the door, you’re going to hit them with the hammer,” the director says matter-of-factly. “It seems logical, but it’s also funny. I wanted them to use whatever they had available. They attack them with frying pans, knives, axes, swords, and all sorts of stuff. I just wanted to use everything available.”

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, when characters die, audiences feel the impact. The unfortunate soldiers of this film aren’t mere cannon fodder…or werewolf chow.

“I wanted there to be realistic stakes,” Marshall says. “Making the characters so sympathetic and empathetic and lovable, we’d feel their deaths more, so that the threat of the werewolves is much higher. There’s always that sense of menace and it’s meant to be a horror film and a suspense thriller, whatever you want to call it. But the humor never undermines that, it just enhances it.”

Long Tail 

There’s only a handful of truly classic werewolf movies, and Dog Soldiers is perhaps the only candidate for that title in the 21st century. There may be fewer werewolves roaming the cinematic hills than before, but Marshall doesn’t think the genre itself is cursed.

“I think the reason that werewolves aren’t so prevalent in horror movies is an expense issue more than anything,” Marshall says. “Vampires and zombies are a hell of a lot cheaper to do than to do werewolves well. They’re either going to do fairly expensive practical werewolves or you’re going to do fairly expensive CG werewolves. But either way there’s no cheap version of werewolves.”

And as for the time-honored debate between practical effects and CGI, especially when related to lycanthropes…

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“My gut experience from movies I’ve seen, I think the practical ones always look best and stand the test of time,” Marshall says. “Even on the bigger budget stuff, like the Underworld movies and things like that and where they kind of mix and match, but the practical ones really look good. The moment it becomes CG, it kind of looks CG and it’s just not so good. Given that werewolves are meant to be kind of half human anyway to me it makes sense to do it with a human in a costume. It’s just going to be better that way.”

Dog Soldiers quickly gained a cult following upon its release, and it’s the kind of film that would appear to be positively howling for a sequel. Originally envisioned as a trilogy, the sequels never materialized. “We would have loved to have done it,” Pertwee says. “Not as much as the millions of fans that incessantly ask me the same question, but I wish we had done it because a lot of people love the movie.”

As for whether it could ever happen, well, Marshall did tell us a little bit about that. “There’s more of a chance now than ever before,” the director teases. “There’s things in the works. We’re seeing what we can do.”

Perhaps everyone’s favorite Dog Soldiers will get to howl once again after all.

The post Dog Soldiers: The Wild History of the Most Action Packed Werewolf Movie Ever Made appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Friends: 10 Phoebe Memes That Are Too Hilarious For Words

25 years after Friends first aired, the show is still an iconic sitcom and the most watched comedy series in 2019. The hilarious characters are what make the show, and each one of them is uniquely relatable. The ten seasons gave us 236 episodes and hours and hours of hilarious material to build an entire meme culture on.

RELATED: 10 Loki Memes Only Real Fans Will Understand

Phoebe Buffay is arguably the strangest of the group--but also the most herself. While everyone finds themselves folding to peer pressure occasionally, Phoebe almost always knows exactly who she is and what she want. Her quirky confidence and outsider's point of view have made her an enduring source for meme material. Here are 10 Phoebe memes that are too hilarious for words.

10 Lobsters Mate for Life

It was Phoebe who taught us in "The One with the Prom Video" that lobsters mate for life. She's trying to tell Ross that Rachel is his lobster, therefore they will end up together. She's right that Ross and Rachel end up together. In fact, they're dating by the end of the episode. On top of being a funny and incongruous image ("old lobster couples walking around the tank") the prediction of love is so sweet that it has made lobsters another word for soulmates.

Unfortunately, she's not exactly right about lobster mating rituals though. But that doesn't matter. Phoebe is still our heart's lobster.

9 The Two Moods of Phoebe Buffay

We know, it's so exhausting waiting for death.

Phoebe's often dramatic responses to situations, like when Joey doesn't want to read lines with her anymore, are so big they always hit their mark. In some ways, Phoebe's role is as the id of the show, the one that follows her instincts and says exactly what she means. This makes her lines perfect for internet meme culture, and her energy is captured perfectly in this meme. We've all got two main moods: Phoebe making it on her own, and Phoebe convinced that she's going to die soon.

8 Phoebe and Ant Man

The true hero of Endgame wasn't Iron Man, it was the rat that brought Ant-Man back from where he was trapped in the Quantum Realm. It runs across the controls, turning the machine back on and allowing Scott Lang out from where he's been stuck for five years. Whose rat is it? Well, we sure know someone who raised rat babies with Paul Rudd before he became a superhero a few years later.

RELATED: 5 Ways Friends Has Aged Poorly (and 5 Ways It's Timeless)

This meme is perfect for all those fans of both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Friends. Maybe the true hero of the MCU is Phoebe, the woman who saved the rat who saved Scott Lang who saved the universe.

7 Parenting Advice from Phoebe Buffay

Let me be clear, best friend: you're naming your child after me.

The internet lives for Phoebe's honest lines and clumsy manipulations. This meme comes from when she tries to convince Rachel and Ross to name their baby after her without actually asking if they will. Now generations of Friends lovers can suggest baby names that pay homage to this wonderful character or use Phoebe's wiles to get babies named after themselves. What two names will you suggest to your pregnant friends?

6 You Don't Deserve Me

This meme is a deep dive into pop culture. The quote is a reference to Marilyn Monroe's famous quote: "But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”

RELATED: 10 Joey and Chandler Memes That Are Almost Too Funny for Words

Ross is a good example of everyone's worst traits: he's petty, insecure, and he uses too much hair gel. Phoebe's a sunny, positive person! (Although, sure, she has a little bit of an edge.) The friends knew it and we know it. But we all have little bits of both Ross and Phoebe in us. So the creator of this meme knows what's up. If you don't love me at my Ross, you don't deserve me at my Phoebe.

5 Too hard!

We're all capable of hard things, but sometimes the effort just isn't worth it. Phoebe knows that in the season five episode eight, "The One With All the Thanksgivings." The episode starts with the gang recovering in the living room after over-eating. Phoebe wants to watch television while they relaxed but she's too full and tired to lift up the remote. Life is full of these little moments when something that's usually really simple suddenly feels impossible, and Lisa Kudrow captures that feeling perfectly.

"Forget it!" is big internet energy. Sure, we could get up and find the credit card, but why would we?

4 Daddy

There's a lot of social and cultural history behind the trend of calling men "daddy" and it goes back much further than Friends. Hundreds of years further back, in fact. So even though it's not accurate, it's funny to think of this moment of Phoebe messing with Ross as a modern-day origin for calling sexy men "daddy."

Of course, the sexualization of the term ends up ruining this for Ross, who had been trying to get his daughter Emma to call him daddy. But the scene where they're both trying to one-up each other with creepy flirting is a comedic moment for the ages.

3 What if...?

Lisa Kudrow has a great force for comedic acting, and so much of Phoebe's funniest moments are the physicality involved. In this particular one, Phoebe has just been told that Santa isn't real. After pretending she knew that in front of Joey, she secretly freaks out.

RELATED: 10 Actors Who Got Big After Appearing on Friends

What if your entire understanding of the universe is upended in a way that you didn't see coming? How could a dog-lover survive having a child that's allergic to dogs? Phoebe's terrified facial expression is a perfect counterpoint to any sort of satirical aha! moment, which is what makes this meme so funny.

2 "I don't even have a pla."

In season one, episode four, "The One with George Stephanopoulos," all the girls have a quarter-life crisis. They all intensely spin out when they realize that they don't have much of a plan for their lives now that they've finished their education. Phoebe's line "I don't even have a 'pla'" is truly iconic.

"I don't even have a 'pla'" can be used any time in your life: Graduating from college? I don't even have a pla. Summer vacation? I don't even have a pla. Financial investments? I don't even have a pla.

1 I Wish I Could...

She's not a millennial, but is there a better symbol of millennial energy than Phoebe in the very first episode of Friends? Ross needs people to help him pack up his apartment now that his divorce from Carol is happening and Phoebe is brutally honest with him. She says, "I wish I could, but I don't want to."

This meme is the perfect meme for almost everyone, ever. Not only does no one ever wants to help their friends move, no one ever wants to do anything. We might wish we wanted to like Phoebe does, but really we all just want to go home and rewatch Friends for the thousandth time.

NEXT: Buffy The Vampire Slayer: 10 Hidden Details About the Main Characters That Everyone Missed 

source https://screenrant.com/friends-phoebe-memes-too-hilarious-words-tv-show/

#screenrant

[segadores-y-soldados]

Blizzard’s shitshow of a timeline, part 2: The Reapening

Alternate title: Blizzard’s shitshow of a timeline: 2 Reap 2 Furious

De vuelta a segar, pendejos - let’s get this shit DONE.

If you want a hook, HAVE ONE:

"Other than really broad things like the Omnic Crisis and big historical moments, in many ways, we're kind of making this up as we go," said Metzen, explaining that they haven't built out every little detail beforehand. "With this one, I think we're taking our time and not trying to get too far ahead of it."

Alright, so it’s fucking LATE so forgive me if I make a bunch of spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.

Let’s talk a little bit more about design - once again, about game design vs. story design vs. character design.

In the other essay, I brought up the fact that there were a number of inconsistencies with Reaper from the original “Overwatch Cinematic Trailer” (the one from November 7, 2014).  I talked mainly about the fact that Reaper used an ability - a pipe bomb launcher - that eventually got reworked into Junkrat’s toolkit and how current Reaper is not the same as the Reaper that appeared in the short, mainly in terms of gameplay...but also even some aspects of character design.

I briefly mentioned the fact that Reaper features very pale skin and not the skintone that made it to the final game (which is like...a weird grey color. *stares into the camera like the Office*)

So I want to be very clear, 100% clear - and please, I’m begging you, please hear me out -

Please keep Metzen’s quote in mind -

This character

Is not Gabriel Reyes.

NOT AS YOU KNOW HIM.  NOT AS WHAT HE IS RIGHT NOW.

THIS IS BASICALLY PROTO-GABRIEL REYES.

Please bear with me, it’s gonna be a long ride, I promise, I will try to deliver.

Taking it from the top:

In the Overwatch Cinematic Trailer/Museum Heist video, there are a few main things to consider:

The gameplay was not set in stone - this is shown by Reaper using an ability that would eventually get worked into another character, Junkrat.

The character designs are not set in stone - Reaper has pale skin, McCree has pale skin and blue eyes, and Tracer’s design underwent minor tweaks before release.

The “story” of Overwatch was not set in stone - and that extends to the vast majority of the character arcs.

I’m gonna propose that it basically did not even exist.

http://overwatch.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2014-overwatch-unveiled-panel-transcript

Here is a direct transcript of the “Overwatch reveal” from BlizzCon 2014 - originally held on Nov 7, 2014.

I’m not gonna quote the whole thing, but basically a few things are revealed:

[Metzen: The story goes that– [how do I do this? The math is a little weird] If the present day of “Overwatch”, is something like 60 years in the future then, “Whoot”, thirty years back from that point, there was a global crisis. And of course, it was robots, and robots are just bad for everybody.]

(I feel fucking vindicated for all the “math” I did last time)

[Metzen: the nations decided to pool their resources and put together a strike force of the best of-the best of-the best technologies and soldiers from different nations around the world and that was the original Overwatch Strike team.

And this strike team did great. It took out the [not going to spoil it] whatever was causing the OMNIC CRISIS, and they handedly dealt with it, and they saved the world. And the world loved it. And so, for the next thirty years this strike force really becomes an institution.]

Notice the lack of names, or hell, even the lack of “numbers” of these soldiers (that wasn’t meant to be a pun but honhonhon).  

Because that DOES lead to the next point:

Soldier: 76 may or may not have existed in November 2014.

There are certainly artworks of “Jack Morrison” all throughout the Cinematic Trailer - there’s the art of him leading some small child out of the rubble, there’s his statue in the background of the museum, so yeah - some sort of “Captain America-knock off” character was implied all over the place in the Trailer.

But here’s the thing:

Soldier: 76 was not shown at Blizzcon 2014.  And the entire concept of the character of “Jack Morrison” wasn’t even mentioned.

Only twelve characters were showcased at Blizzcon 2014:

[Metzen: So that is the twelve we came with this weekend. Like we said, there are many-many more to come. It’s one of the funniest parts of Overwatch– is getting kinda to work with the team to get these characters, how they interrelate and who goes back with who, and who went to college with who, and who has (???) in a longstanding. It’s super-super fun stuff. I hope you have enjoyed at least a quick look of our growing pantheon of characters.]

I would like to point out that there are two characters here who don’t even have “real faces” - Reaper and Reinhardt.

In fact, I’d argue that they probably did not have real character designs for another few months, along with two other “major Omnic Crisis characters” - Soldier: 76 and Ana Amari.

There are no pictures of Reinhardt without his helmet, Ana Amari, or - and this is the point - Gabriel Reyes at all during the Cinematic Trailer/Museum Heist.  And while the character who eventually became “Jack Morrison” existed, he had no name, and was largely just...window dressing to stamp on the lore.

And maybe this is pushing it -

But I suspect that Reaper didn’t even have a real background at this point in time:

[Metzen: We have the enigmatic Reaper. Reaper is just a bad man. No one knows too much about Reaper, but his hellfire shotguns. They are kind of feared throughout the world, and hotspots and divine places around the world. This guy shows up and makes things worse always.]

There’s a word here - it starts with “d” and ends with “-ecades” that is distinctly missing from this character description.  In contrast, Reinhardt does have the barest sketch of a character backstory - he’s noted as being  “one of the of original Overwatch strike force” - and Ana is very briefly hinted at in Pharah’s description (“[Fareeha’s] mother was a part of Overwatch, and she always really wanted to be a part of it but by the time she graduated from the academy Overwatch was gone.”)

In fact, it’s directly stated that Reaper was developed almost 100% from a gameplay standpoint before anything else.

[“We built the four core combat heroes, which were Tracer, Reaper, Widowmaker, and… well it was supposed to be Mercy or Reinhardt.  Then everyone was falling in love with Pharah…” - Michael Heiberg]

[“Reaper and Widowmaker and Tracer, we knew what they looked like from the get-go.  They were very concept driven.  Pharah was different.” - Tim Ford]

[“That was actually a really solid foundation.  Widowmaker, Pharah, Reaper, Tracer… a really great core set of characters that helped a lot on the level design, to be able to understand what these characters were able to do.”  - Dave Adams]

All of the above quotes come from the Special Edition artbook.

Of the four “core combat characters,” Tracer’s story was the most extensive at the time of the panel, with possibly Pharah’s next and then arguably Widowmaker before Reaper.

Now, those of you who know Blizzard better than me already know that a lot of this is pretty much speculation - Soldier: 76 has basically been Metzen’s “original character” for years (... “decades” - seriously, go look him up if you need a laugh).  If anything, just as how Reaper was created “purely from a gameplay standpoint,” Soldier: 76 was created from “only a story standpoint” - his gameplay mechanics had to be filled in later, after the core combat characters proved they could work.  It’s likely that the “Overwatch Soldier: 76” existed - as in, name, biography, story, etc, - but mainly in concept form.   The Overwatch version of Soldier: 76 would not be fully revealed until July 2015 - at that point he had a name, a face, a personal history, and “a vendetta.”  

But that was also when three other characters had their art revealed as well:

If someone wants to correct me on this, feel free, but essentially the entire “story” of the original Overwatch team was publically revealed in a span of like...two days, July 6-7, 2015.  This is the first time that “Gabriel Reyes” is even mentioned as a name.

And that brings me back to the main point:

["Other than really broad things like the Omnic Crisis and big historical moments, in many ways, we're kind of making this up as we go," said Metzen, explaining that they haven't built out every little detail beforehand. "With this one, I think we're taking our time and not trying to get too far ahead of it."]

http://www.pcgamer.com/overwatch-story-chris-metzen-interview/

This comes from an interview with both Christ Metzen and Michael Chu where they essentially confirm that the details of Overwatch and its characters are created in an “off the cuff” fashion.  The article was posted in December 2015, a few months after the “story” of the Fall of Overwatch had been revealed to the public.

It’s also the first time that the story developers imply that Reaper is Reyes.

[Metzen: But yeah, I think if the characters call for it, we have certain kind of relationship dynamics that could bubble up. There's a lot of history between 76 and Reaper, it's a little more foreground than the two ninjas. But I think we want to chase those when we see them—points of connection that birth a lot of cool story. Whether it feels like it's foreground or not, the story's the story, and I think we always want to stay open to those types of things.]

So I mean this in a very cut-and-dry way:

It’s extremely likely that the story of Gabriel Reyes was “given” to Reaper to fill out the “core combat character” and give him a place in the world of Overwatch.

We know that Reaper underwent further gameplay and stylistic designs - most notably, his “early concept” pale skintone was changed to some weird grey color (??).  And while other aspects of his Reaper design did not change much, nothing points to him having an “unmasked face” until the first picture of the Overwatch First Strike team shows up.  Soldier: 76 has a true “face model” underneath his tactical visor, and Reinhardt was eventually given a number of skins without his helmet on.  Reaper, meanwhile, only has the “Blackwatch Reyes” still as his “unmasked” skin and - as far as I can find - no one has been able to take the Reaper mask off the character model itself.

To add to this point - that Reaper was pretty much a “blank slate” in both unmasked design and story:

[“There were two ways heroes came about.  One was basically that Arnold Tsang would draw a cool picture of a hero we’d want to play, and design would figure out how to make that a reality.  And then there was the opposite, where design had the desire to fill out a gameplay niche first, and the art would come later.  The that we had that push in both directions at once, that creative mind-meld, it was really neat to see.” - Lee Sparks]

http://overwatch.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2014-overwatch-origins-panel-transcript

Another Blizzcon 2014 panel, featuring Chris Metzen (SVP Story and Franchise Development), Jeff Chamberlain (VFX Supervisor), Jeff Kaplan (game director), Bill Petras (art director) and Arnold Tsang (Lead Character Concept Artist).

[Metzen: You guys have seen the art at the beginning of the trailer, that’s kind of Arn’s house style so we’ve really just been trying to keep pace with Arn and we’ve really been enjoying this new art style, this fresh new take; I mean how many of you saw that trailer yesterday?]

Tsang drew the art for the Cinematic Trailer.

[Metzen: As we were kinda getting the art style together, as we were defining the game at a more distilled level we started working on these universe ideas and this intro cinematic really, really early, like way earlier than we normally would engage on a normal project like that at that point in development and Jeff and his team were instrumental in helping us find the style that translates between the reality of the game world and the reality of the cinematic expression.]

Oh.

Hang on.

[Metzen: this intro cinematic really, really early, like way earlier than we normally would engage on a normal project like that at that point in development]

[Metzen: really, really early, like way earlier than we normally would]

Hmm.

Like so early that a few of the characters didn’t have designs for faces?

[Kaplan: I remember other moments where other heroes came to be and Reaper is a good example where– Reaper we had no idea what… [...] But anyway… Reaper was particularly cool because that was a hero that was entirely inspired by the art; we just saw that character and we were like “oh man that’s cool; like he has to be in the game,” and that’s one where you just see the art and you go ok we are going to need to sit down and figure out what this guy does.]

From the sound of it, Tsang designed Reaper, which led to him being given gameplay mechanics.  But not necessarily story?

Or even real character?

It’s intriguing, and interestingly, there’s a question from someone in the audience:

[Question: Hello, I’ve been going to BlizzCon for like six years now and I’ve heard on panel after panel in previous years people going please we want more diversity and honestly it was so exciting to see Overwatch because there’s like five female characters; I’m super excited, I was just wondering can we expect more female characters, more POC’s, more cultural diversity, more body diversity in future heroes that we are going to see in Overwatch?]

[Metzen: Yes. All of that, all. Often. I got to say honestly, just to follow up on that guys… it comes up every year especially in the World of Warcraft and we recognize that there are lot of people who want to feel represented and that is part of how we look at this product; we want to have these international cast of characters, we want everyone to come in play and we want people to feel represented and feel that there are characters that speak to them so we are putting a lot of thought and passion into that.

We came here with twelve characters this weekend, we have many, many more that we are already developing and there’s many more that we have concepts for but we are still working through the ideas so there’s a lot about this game that is seeking that as a very high ideal, to have people feel like they can be represented and feel like they can be part of this fictional event and that’s very important to us.]

And there’s more:

[Question: My big issue with the cinematic is that you have all these hero characters and they are fighting against each other and the same thing with the objectives; they are heroes but they are fighting against each other and there’s no real big villain, there’s no antagonist except for the other heroes. So when does the line get drawn to say these are heroes, these are villains and this is the objective everybody is chasing?]

[Metzen: So I guess the next point is (well) where is the story? Where does the narrative occur?

We feel these spaces and it’s kind of cool, you tell me that this character comes from this city but where does it play out, where will we be seeing the context of these characters? We don’t have anything to announce yet, we have a lot of plans that way, obviously you guys saw the cinematic yesterday which is something we just absolutely love; well we want to do more of that, we want to have deep rich stories that are fun and tug on your heart strings and just literally kick butt and show you the bigger tapestry of this world and how some of these kooky characters relate; what they think about each other, are there enmities, how do the villains play into this whole thing?]

[Kaplan: What’s cool about this, by kinda letting the gameplay breathe on its own and letting the story breathe on its own, we didn’t put any constraints on Jeff when it came to making this movie. We just said make a cool story in the Overwatch universe and we’ll make a cool game in your movie story and that’s how we’ve been sort of approaching it.]

There are several other questions along this line, but all of them result in the team saying, “These ideas are awesome!” in some way.

But here’s one that’s interesting and worth noting:

[Question: I’m not going to ask about packs but are you going to have alternate skins maybe?]

[Kaplan: That sounds awesome too, all I need to answer is yeah that sounds amazing; these characters look at them, they are beautiful and they are from the mind of Arnold and I can only imagine what Arnold would do if he started skinning these characters and how awesome they would look so hopefully something like that.]

So we glean a few things from this series of panel discussions and responses:

Reaper was designed as art first, then gameplay, with his “story” being third and probably last, perhaps several months after the Cinematic Trailer was completed.

The Overwatch team was committed to creating characters of diversity, and at the time of the panel, they had a lot of “concepts” for the heroes.

It was implied that Arnold Tsang would be the one given the majority of control over designing “alternate skins.”

Now, how much of the last part panned out is unknown, but considering that Arnold probably drew this guy (or had an assistant draw him):

And then to reveal six months later:

To be followed up with this skin upon the game’s release:

Well.

There are better artists than myself out there who will probably tell you that art is a process - some things come to your mind in a moment of inspiration and pure imagination.  Some things are born with aesthetic design - location, buildings, settings, environments, or even characters - first and their story is filled in later, and others are basically hammered out slowly and painfully over time.

Please.

Please know that I am not defending Chu or Blizzard or whatever process they do use to develop characters.

And before people suggest that I’m making leaps in logic (which is entirely possible, it’s like 2 am here), consider the fact that:

The in-game article on Sombra - and this image is taken from July 2016 ( http://imgur.com/gallery/Rvv8y ) - features a design from her concept art that was not used at all - not even as a skin.

Should point to the fact that this process is still happening even with the current game.

So what’s the fucking point of all this?

My point remains the fucking same from the last post.

Chu: stop fucking vague-answering shit on your twitter.  Like, technically, you’re correct - that dude from the Cinematic Trailer was NOT Reyes, and technically, he still isn’t.  But seriously, man, when you put the pieces together - from the pale skin to the pipe bomb launcher to the 2014 Blizzcon panels to the bloody timeline of Tsang’s art - it looks real obvious that NO ONE was Reyes in the Cinematic Trailer -

Because the full story, concept, and background of the character of Gabriel Reyes probably didn’t really exist yet - not in full, not in any real presentable way.

You had a demonstration of half a character called Reaper - who was missing Shadowstep in the animation, who had “the wrong skintone,” who used the “wrong ability.”

And who probably did not have a real name or face.

Who probably did not have a real story.

Your boss literally called him “a bad man” as his only descriptor.

It’s okay to admit that you may not fully know Tsang’s art process.  Maybe Chu does and maybe he doesn’t - he certainly probably knows more than me on this issue, right?

[Metzen: Ultimately, as the characters kind of come into view—some of them start with a fictional idea, some of them start with a drawing, many of them start with a gameplay paradigm that we want to achieve. Widowmaker ultimately starts with, “Hey, let's have a ranged sniper.” And I think some of them just lend themselves towards one vibe or another and we didn't want to say, “Well, there's no bad guys at all,” because certainly there would be in a world like this. We want to let each character just take the shape it feels like they're taking. But we didn't necessarily want to come flat out and pose the franchise as one of those binary things.]

[Chu: And what Chris was saying about some of the characters, we've talked about it in interviews. But I think for some of these characters there is actually a little more going on. They're not exactly bad guys. I think there's a lot of room to talk about what is a guy like Soldier: 76? I mean, good guy, bad guy? Like there's a lot of room to kind of analyze what's going on. Someone like Symmetra, too. And we're really pushing for that, too, with a lot of our characters. I mean, obviously, we have some characters like the Junkers who are pretty much bad dudes who are out having fun, causing mayhem. But I think in the middle, a lot of characters exist and are interesting for that reason.]

[Metzen: Because their character has somewhere to go.]

And something worth noting, since there seem to be lots of...pressure to move in this direction:

[PCG: At the time you guys released that cinematic, had you already made the Numbani map? Had you decided that you were going to go further with Doomfist? Or at that point was it literally just a gauntlet?]

[Metzen: At that point, when we made the cinematic, it was just a gauntlet. I remember we kind of had a writing team at the time as we were scripting that cinematic and Jeff Chamberlain, the director [of the announcement cinematic], really laid a lot of that out. But I'm like, I want to just have almost like a shotgun blast of flavor. So I had riffed Sound Quake and Doomfist, and I just personally enjoy riffing compound noun names if World of Warcraft is any indicator. So I just threw a bunch of shit out to make it sound like there's all this texture. I guess we're letting air out of the balloon and looking much less cool, but that was the intent of the flick—to create a sense of a far larger tapestry that we would actually weave together over time.]

[Metzen:So with Overwatch, we didn't over-design or over-world-build at all. We've tried to keep pace with the number of characters in development at any given time and make sure that the calories we're burning are specifically useful in rounding out each character in turn and then making connection points. Other than really broad things like the Omnic Crisis and big historical moments, in many ways, we're kind of making this up as we go and taking advantage of all these little details that filter out and tying up these ends and drawing touch points between them. In a way, it's a much more organic way to build a world and to broaden its tapestry. For instance, as opposed to on Warcraft and StarCraft—I went crazy on those first games, like building out this big world history. With this one, I think we're taking our time and not trying to get too far ahead of it so that, again, we and the developers have maximum freedom to chase new ideas and not be overly bogged down by the weight of a franchise that can occur over time. Which, in many ways, is like the anti-WoW.]

And maybe this is pretty fucking arrogant of me, but I’m just gonna quote myself:

[I’m tired of seeing funny, interesting, unique, creative characters get reworked by their creators into something more “typical” so that they don’t have to deal with the heavy lifting of the problems that come with defying expectations.]

Because the point remains the fucking same.

Blizzard, Overwatch team - I don’t know what sort of weirdass trauma WoW gave you, but contrary to your beliefs - there is literally no such thing as too much story.  People will consume fucking anything as a story.  People read fucking Finnegans Wake.  People actually know Marvel timelines and universes.  People were willing to watch four dumbasses with Halo and xboxes and way too much time on their hands make a fucking 14-season saga out of pure BOREDOM.

And maybe I’m just losing my mind, but it’s pretty fucking thoughtless and tactless of you to let your fans do all the hard work of filling in the gaps and building up your world -

http://m.ign.com/articles/2016/09/17/overwatch-a-world-fans-built

- Just so you can reap the benefits, and then drop little pieces of lore on a whim because some guy would rather tweet his ideas of a story than actually work on a full story.

So please, Blizzard and Overwatch’s development team:

You’ve made a fucking fun, amazing game.  You’ve made a bunch of funny, interesting, unique, creative characters.  You have defied my every expectation on what it means to play a team-based first-person shooter.

Please,

Do it again with Gabriel.

My bar is set low.  I am daring you to raise it higher.  Show me that - even if this character was whipped together halfassed over the course of a year, that his “grimdark” edge came first, and then his fun gameplay, and then his witty one-liners, and then his story - show me that you are committed to doing right by him and what he represents to untold numbers of people who need a character that speaks to them.

I would love nothing more than to see y’all match or surpass the complicated, complex versions of Gabriel Reyes the fans have developed.

And to everyone who stuck with me through this trainwreck of a post:

First off, thank you.  Your patience and support and your willingness to read this rambling shitshow is amazing.

I will remind you again:

They can make him “a bad man.”  They can halfass his story.  They can string together designs and make them all masked because he still doesn’t have a real face on that character model.

But you’re probably here because you saw something in his character that speaks to you.

And I don’t give a fuck if that line was “This is my curse” or “You look ridiculous” or “Dead man walking” or even something as recent as “Now those are some fireworks.”

You hold your Gabriel Reyes tight and warm.

Lord knows the poor man needs a fucking hug.

#i just #why #my writing #reaper #gabriel reyes #overwatch #blizzard #i'm done #i'm out #i need sleep #lay me down in the earth and bury me #fuck all this noise #like chu #i literally have an article #where you and your boss literally admitted #you were flying by the seat of your ass #essays #decades my ass #yall literally made this shit up one piece at a time #like I love Soldier 76 more than is humanly possible #but how the fuck is it that he gets all the backstory

[jimmygeurts]

BEST MOVIES OF 2016

Aquarius 

We ascribe a lot of meaning into the personal possessions we collect and the places we live over the years. That seems like it might be a tough concept to convey in a cinematically compelling way, but director Kleber Mendonca Filho pulls it off with his latest movie. While his previous film Neighboring Sounds took a broader view of a Brazilian neighborhood, Aquarius focuses on a single woman and her longtime apartment, creating a 145-minute epic and political parable out of it. And it features the performance of a lifetime for actress Sonia Braga as that woman Clara.

Arrival

For reasons that are easy enough to understand if you’re familiar with both films’ plots, Interstellar is the Christopher Nolan film most people associate with Arrival. But really it’s closer to Memento in that both are ingeniously structured films built to surprise and pack an emotional wallop in its ending. It’s guided by everything from maybe Amy Adams’ best turn to Denis Villeneuve’s assured direction to its capable production design and score. And it, along with the upcoming Blade Runner 2049 and Dune remake, suggest Villeneuve may be our next great science-fiction filmmaker. We’ve come a long way from the dopey giant spider of Enemy. 

Green Room

As a lover of both punk music and genre films, Green Room is a brilliant combination of both. It gets punks better than nearly any other movie — how they’re less likely to be spiky-haired Sid Vicious types than relatively mild-mannered folks (including Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat and the late, great Anton Yelchin) concerned about charging their phones, finding gas for the car and getting to the next terrible gig. Then it takes the worst possible one in an isolated neo-Nazi venue and devises an expertly claustrophobic scenario out of it. In a banner year for close-quarters thrillers (see also: Don’t Breathe, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Hush), this one stands tall. 

The Handmaiden 

Speaking of expertly crafted genre films, there’s the latest and greatest from Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook. Reimagining Patricia Highsmith’s Victorian-era novel Fingersmith, The Handmaiden lets the filmmaker play with a formal dress period setting and formal chops anyone could appreciate. But there’s also the lurid details of his previous work, including explicit lesbian sex scenes, sadistic behavior and some unsavory actions involving a wooden puppet and bells. The result is the kind of combination of high art and the low-minded that we don’t usually get on screen outside of Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven.

Manchester by the Sea 

Manchester by the Sea is a portrait of death and grief that’s so devastating at times it can feel nearly unbearable. It’s also one of the funniest films of the year, in ways that often directly connect to the former. It’s about the ways the world can be so cosmically cruel you can’t do anything but laugh bitterly; your dead brother is in a freezer, you have a huge new responsibility to take on when you’re a wreck, the goddamn stretcher won’t even fit into the ambulance. That’s an incredibly tough emotional high-wire act to pull off, but thankfully this has the singular talent of Kenneth Lonergan behind it, as well as unforgettable performances by Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams.

Moonlight 

When I called Carol the best American Wong Kar-Wai film last year, perhaps I spoke too soon. The gorgeous third act of Barry Jenkins’ sophomore feature Moonlight, along with Carol and the Lily Gladstone/Kristen Stewart segment of Certain Women, seems to suggest that diner scenes are the best cinematic settings for romantic longing. Yet Moonlight also has much to say about race, sexuality, family, even Florida. Its ability to successfully span all of this subject matter over three different time periods makes it one of the most skillful cinematic feats of the year.

O.J.: Made in America

Not only did we get two films about Sarasota newscaster Christine Chubbuck this year, we got two sprawling epics about O.J. Simpson. One could quibble about whether O.J.: Made in America should be considered television or cinema — it was primarily viewed as a five-part event on ESPN, to be fair — but I’d argue it’s a film whose eight-hour running length gives it a scope few documentaries can compete with. In Simpson’s history, it encompasses race, gender, fame, the judicial system and more. By the time it gets to its truly pathetic final hour, it convincingly makes the case his life story is one of America’s greatest tragedies.

Paterson

In a year where “the working-class” and “the elite” were endlessly, needlessly pitted against each other, this lovely story of a bus driver who also writes poetry begs the question why. It’s also gently, nonchalantly inclusive in its diverse cast of characters in a way that feels like a salve in these turbulent times. It’s gripping even as its plot revolves around a normal guy’s work week and a dramatic climax that hinges on a misbehaving dog. Jim Jarmusch has long been one of our best filmmakers; this and Only Lovers Left Alive suggest he may be getting even better with time.

Toni Erdmann 

A prankster dad who sports fake dentures, a wig and an obviously false alias to get closer to his workaholic daughter has all the trappings of an obnoxiously broad comedy. Yet in the capable hands of Everyone Else’s Maren Ade, it becomes one of the best, most idiosyncratic films of the year. It’s a showcase for some wonderfully absurdist comedic set pieces (naked party! “The Greatest Love of All”!), a cutting corporate satire and a genuinely touching family drama. Hiring Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig for the American remake isn’t a bad start, but it has its work set out to achieve something this singular.

The Witch

The Witch hasn’t made a huge number of end-of-year list appearances, perhaps because it’s been one year since its theatrical release and two years since its Sundance premiere, perhaps because of the seemingly growing backlash against “indie horror.” No matter: it’s one of the best films of 2016, indie, horror or otherwise. The most memorable moments may come in the unnerving final act, as things truly get hellish. Yet arguably even more impressive is how compelling its slow-burn build is, aided by debut filmmaker Robert Eggers’ assured direction and the convincing Puritan period details.

Honorable mentions: 20th Century Women, Cameraperson, Certain Women, Christine, Elle, Hell or High Water, Indignation, Love & Friendship, The Mermaid, Microbe & Gasoline, My Golden Days, The Nice Guys, Right Now, Wrong Then, Silence

Still haven’t seen: I Am Not Your Negro, The Red Turtle, The Salesman, Things to Come, Tower

#aquarius #arrival #green room #the handmaiden #manchester by the sea #moonlight #oj: made in america #paterson #toni erdmann #the witch #top ten #film

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Kevin Wozniak on Kevflix: Best Movies of 2019 – Best Movie Moments

Every year when I begin to look back at the movies of 2019 and begin to make my lists, this is always my favorite list to make.  It is a tough list to make, but always an exciting and interesting list to make.  I get to look back and look at my favorite moments of the year in movies. Whether it was a scene or a moment that scared me, thrilled me, caused an emotional reaction, or one of just pure entertainment, these are the ones that knocked me out in 2019.  Here are my picks for the best movie moments of 2019.

  SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

SPOILERS AHEAD

  You’ve been warned.

          10. LANDING ON NEPTUNE – AD ASTRA 

The third act of James Gray’s brilliant sci-fi film is one of great filmmaking and visual effects.  Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is on the tail end of his mission and goes to Neptune to find his father and this scene literally took my breath away.  Just the sheer idea of traveling that far into space is unbelievable, but this also sets the movie up for its big emotional climax.  It’s a gorgeous scene and the best part of James Gray’s stunning achievement.

    9. SOCCER BALL PREGNANCY – GREENER GRASS 

Greener Grass was one of the weirdest movies I saw in 2019, yet one that I grew to love the more I thought about it and the more I saw it.  This is a twisted, hilarious, dark comedy that is full of bits and scenes of bizarre behavior.  My favorite bit, and one that is making me laugh as I type this out, is a simple one and one you have to see to understand, as explaining it doesn’t do it justice.  During a neighborhood soccer game, Lisa (pictured above, played by Dawn Luebbe) takes the soccer ball as it was kicked out of bounds, sticks under her dress, and from that point on is pregnant.  This is a recurring bit throughout the movie, which included a baby shower, the child being born, and family pictures.  Again, it’s strange stuff, but it is also the funniest running joke of 2019.

    8. OPENING SHOT – CLIMAX

Gaspar Noé films are films that stick with you.  He completely immerses you into them and makes you feel some kind of way when watching them, usually a feeling of discomfort or horror.  The opening to his latest film, Climax, is no different.  This five-minute, uncut introduction features over a dozen actors dancing their hearts out to techno music.  It is an exhausting, hypnotic shot, filled with slick camera moves, stunning colors, and crazy dance movements that sets us up for what is to come in this horrifying, claustrophobic trip.

    7. FINAL SHOT – PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE  

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of Lady on Fire is a movie that has stuck with me since I saw it back in October.  It is a beautiful love story about two women who’s love grows stronger and deeper the more they observe each other, yet they know their relationship cannot last.  The final shot of the film a master stroke from Sciamma and powerhouse acting from Adèle Haenel.  Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse’s (Haenel) relationship has ended when Héloïse was forced to get married.  Having not seen each other since, Marianne sees Héloïse at a concert on the other side of theater.  Vivaldi’s “Concerto No. 2”, a callback to an earlier scene, begins to play and we watch Héloïse go through a whirlwind of emotions.  We watch as she remembers everything about her time with Marainne, the good times, the bad times, the times that they laughed, and the times they cried.  Sciamma doesn’t cut from Haenel and we watch for a solid two minutes as the emotions rush through her.  It’s a beautiful final shot in one of the most beautiful movies of the year.

    6. “I AM IRON MAN” – AVENGERS: ENDGAME

“I am Iron Man.”  These words shook the comic book movie landscape forever and kicked off one of the biggest franchises in cinematic history.  Eleven years later, these words are more powerful than ever.  When it seemed like Thanos had gotten the best of the Avengers once again, capturing all the infinity stones on the infinity gauntlet, he tries to snap everything in existence away, only to realize Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) has taken the stones and made his own gauntlet on his suit.  Iron Man then utters the words, “I…am…Iron Man.”, then snaps Thanos and everything he brought away, saving the galaxy.  These would be last words Tony Stark would ever say and it was the perfect end to a character arc, coming full circle from the time he said them at that press conference back in 2008 to his dying words in 2019.

    5. “IT’S GONNA HAPPEN” – THE IRISHMAN 

There were a number of scenes from Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour gangster masterpiece that I could have chosen here.  But this small scene really hit me hard.  In a quiet dinning room on their way to a wedding, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) informs Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) that he will be traveling to Detroit to kill his friend Jimmy Hoffa, all while eating cereal and drinking coffee.  This is Pesci’s Oscar scene, as his calm, yet terrifying demeanor really puts Frank in a bind.  De Niro doesn’t say much, but his eyes say everything.  He is now torn between the man who brought him into this life and his friend.  It’s a powerful scene and a sucker punch to the gut.

    4. MEETING MR. ROGERS – A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD 

The opening of Marielle Heller’s wonderful film starts exactly how every Mr. Rogers episode started, with Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks) walking into his home singing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”.  This is our first glimpse of Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers and it is the moment we fall in love with him.  There was a lot of speculation around Hanks as Rogers, as he doesn’t look and sound anything like Rogers.  But with the help of brilliant costume design, some small make-up, and Hanks hitting all the vocal notes, you immediately believe Hanks is Rogers.  Heller brilliantly shot the opening like the T.V. show and set the stage for one the most heart-warming movies of 2019.

    3. “GO TO WAR” – FORD V. FERRARI

Ford v Ferrari is a great American sports movie.  A movie about the underdog overcoming all obstacles to to rise to the top.  One of the key aspects of a great sports movie is a great, inspirational speech, a la Miracle or Friday Night Lights.  Ford v Ferrari has one and it is said by the wonderful Tracy Letts as Henry Ford II.  Ford is giving a speech to Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) about the history of Ford Motors during time of war and how the company persevered through tough times, symbolic of how everything is going for Shelby in trying make a car that is capable of winning the 24 hour at Le Mans.  Ford ends his speech by telling  Shelby, “go to war” and it is a moment that might as well have come with a bald eagle screeching in background.  A speech that represents everything red, white, and blue and makes you want to stand up and yell, “AMERICA!” while pumping your fist in the air.

    2. THE FIGHT – MARRIAGE STORY 

Two of the best performances of 2019 come from Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story.  The two actors give arguably the best performances of their respective careers and commit to being a couple attempting to go through a divorce with as little stress as possible and as cordial as possible.  However, that doesn’t happen and the two end up at each other’s throats, in an explosive scene of emotion and acting mastery.  The entire film was building to this moment and it is as an absolute explosion of a scene.  Johansson and Driver is incredible and Baumbach’s writing is top-tier.  You feel everything they are saying.  You feel the pain, the anger, and the sadness that comes with every word.  It’s acting at its finest and if these two end up winning Oscars for their performances, this is the scene that got them those statues.

      1. “AVENGERS!  ASSEMBLE!” – AVENGERS: ENDGAME 

As soon as I saw this scene, I knew it would be number one on this list and it wouldn’t be close.  This scene is not only the definition of awesome, but it is epic on every scale.  When all hope seems lost for Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and the remaining Avengers and it looks like Thanos’ army will take over the planet, we hear the static of Falcon’s (Anthony Mackie) voice in Captain America’s ear, followed by the appearance of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) coming from a Doctor Strange portal.  It is then an onslaught of everyone from the MCU appearing on screen, both those who disappeared in the snap and those who survived, all culminating in an attack on Thanos and his army with Captain America commanding, “AVENGERS!  ASSEMBLE!”.  Alan Silvestri’s epic score takes over and we watch as eleven years and over twenty movies come together on the screen at the same time.  You can’t help but get emotional watching this.  We have grown with the MCU and The Avengers and all of these characters and seeing them all on screen at the same time fighting for their lives and the galaxy is something we had been waiting for for over a decade.  This is not only the best scene of 2019, but possibly the best scene of the decade, symbolizing so much of what cinema has become while also being the as big as anything that has ever been on the big screen.

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Friends: 10 Phoebe Memes That Are Too Hilarious For Words – Screen Rant

25 years after Friends first aired, the show is still an iconic sitcom and the most watched comedy series in 2019. The hilarious characters are what make the show, and each one of them is uniquely relatable. The ten seasons gave us 236 episodes and hours and hours of hilarious material to build an entire meme culture on.

RELATED: 10 Loki Memes Only Real Fans Will Understand

Phoebe Buffay is arguably the strangest of the group–but also the most herself. While everyone finds themselves folding to peer pressure occasionally, Phoebe almost always knows exactly who she is and what she want. Her quirky confidence and outsider’s point of view have made her an enduring source for meme material. Here are 10 Phoebe memes that are too hilarious for words.

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10 Lobsters Mate for Life

It was Phoebe who taught us in “The One with the Prom Video” that lobsters mate for life. She’s trying to tell Ross that Rachel is his lobster, therefore they will end up together. She’s right that Ross and Rachel end up together. In fact, they’re dating by the end of the episode. On top of being a funny and incongruous image (“old lobster couples walking around the tank”) the prediction of love is so sweet that it has made lobsters another word for soulmates.

Unfortunately, she’s not exactly right about lobster mating rituals though. But that doesn’t matter. Phoebe is still our heart’s lobster.

9 The Two Moods of Phoebe Buffay

We know, it’s so exhausting waiting for death.

Phoebe’s often dramatic responses to situations, like when Joey doesn’t want to read lines with her anymore, are so big they always hit their mark. In some ways, Phoebe’s role is as the id of the show, the one that follows her instincts and says exactly what she means. This makes her lines perfect for internet meme culture, and her energy is captured perfectly in this meme. We’ve all got two main moods: Phoebe making it on her own, and Phoebe convinced that she’s going to die soon.

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8 Phoebe and Ant Man

The true hero of Endgame wasn’t Iron Man, it was the rat that brought Ant-Man back from where he was trapped in the Quantum Realm. It runs across the controls, turning the machine back on and allowing Scott Lang out from where he’s been stuck for five years. Whose rat is it? Well, we sure know someone who raised rat babies with Paul Rudd before he became a superhero a few years later.

RELATED: 5 Ways Friends Has Aged Poorly (and 5 Ways It’s Timeless)

This meme is perfect for all those fans of both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Friends. Maybe the true hero of the MCU is Phoebe, the woman who saved the rat who saved Scott Lang who saved the universe.

7 Parenting Advice from Phoebe Buffay

Let me be clear, best friend: you’re naming your child after me.

The internet lives for Phoebe’s honest lines and clumsy manipulations. This meme comes from when she tries to convince Rachel and Ross to name their baby after her without actually asking if they will. Now generations of Friends lovers can suggest baby names that pay homage to this wonderful character or use Phoebe’s wiles to get babies named after themselves. What two names will you suggest to your pregnant friends?

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6 You Don’t Deserve Me

This meme is a deep dive into pop culture. The quote is a reference to Marilyn Monroe’s famous quote: “But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

RELATED: 10 Joey and Chandler Memes That Are Almost Too Funny for Words

Ross is a good example of everyone’s worst traits: he’s petty, insecure, and he uses too much hair gel. Phoebe’s a sunny, positive person! (Although, sure, she has a little bit of an edge.) The friends knew it and we know it. But we all have little bits of both Ross and Phoebe in us. So the creator of this meme knows what’s up. If you don’t love me at my Ross, you don’t deserve me at my Phoebe.

5 Too hard!

We’re all capable of hard things, but sometimes the effort just isn’t worth it. Phoebe knows that in the season five episode eight, “The One With All the Thanksgivings.” The episode starts with the gang recovering in the living room after over-eating. Phoebe wants to watch television while they relaxed but she’s too full and tired to lift up the remote. Life is full of these little moments when something that’s usually really simple suddenly feels impossible, and Lisa Kudrow captures that feeling perfectly.

“Forget it!” is big internet energy. Sure, we could get up and find the credit card, but why would we?

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4 Daddy

There’s a lot of social and cultural history behind the trend of calling men “daddy” and it goes back much further than Friends. Hundreds of years further back, in fact. So even though it’s not accurate, it’s funny to think of this moment of Phoebe messing with Ross as a modern-day origin for calling sexy men “daddy.”

Of course, the sexualization of the term ends up ruining this for Ross, who had been trying to get his daughter Emma to call him daddy. But the scene where they’re both trying to one-up each other with creepy flirting is a comedic moment for the ages.

3 What if…?

Lisa Kudrow has a great force for comedic acting, and so much of Phoebe’s funniest moments are the physicality involved. In this particular one, Phoebe has just been told that Santa isn’t real. After pretending she knew that in front of Joey, she secretly freaks out.

RELATED: 10 Actors Who Got Big After Appearing on Friends

What if your entire understanding of the universe is upended in a way that you didn’t see coming? How could a dog-lover survive having a child that’s allergic to dogs? Phoebe’s terrified facial expression is a perfect counterpoint to any sort of satirical aha! moment, which is what makes this meme so funny.

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2 “I don’t even have a pla.”

In season one, episode four, “The One with George Stephanopoulos,” all the girls have a quarter-life crisis. They all intensely spin out when they realize that they don’t have much of a plan for their lives now that they’ve finished their education. Phoebe’s line “I don’t even have a ‘pla'” is truly iconic.

“I don’t even have a ‘pla'” can be used any time in your life: Graduating from college? I don’t even have a pla. Summer vacation? I don’t even have a pla. Financial investments? I don’t even have a pla.

1 I Wish I Could…

She’s not a millennial, but is there a better symbol of millennial energy than Phoebe in the very first episode of Friends? Ross needs people to help him pack up his apartment now that his divorce from Carol is happening and Phoebe is brutally honest with him. She says, “I wish I could, but I don’t want to.”

This meme is the perfect meme for almost everyone, ever. Not only does no one ever wants to help their friends move, no one ever wants to do anything. We might wish we wanted to like Phoebe does, but really we all just want to go home and rewatch Friends for the thousandth time.

NEXT: Buffy The Vampire Slayer: 10 Hidden Details About the Main Characters That Everyone Missed 

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Bài viết Friends: 10 Phoebe Memes That Are Too Hilarious For Words – Screen Rant đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

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The "Tonight...on Knights" section of Shrek 2 has got to be one of the funniest moments in cinematic history

#i'm crying #go watch it

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Valley Girl (2018)

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Valley Girl (2018)

Valley Girl Release Date

  In Theaters June 29, 2018

Valley Girl Credits

Starring: Mae Whitman

Written By: Wayne Crawford, Andrew Lane, Jenny Lumet, and Amy Talkington

Directed By: Rachel Goldenberg

Produced By: Matt Smith and Steven J. Wolfe

Distributor: MGM

IMDB: Valley Girl on IMDB

If you’re excited for Valley Girl

Set to a new wave ’80s soundtrack, a pair of young lovers from different backgrounds defy their parents and friends to stay together. A musical adaptation of the 1983 film.

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