@dakotahommes

Marla Grayson describes herself as a predator. Here’s how her con works: she becomes a court-appointed legal guardian to senior citizens who may or may not be able to take care of themselves. Then she puts them in a care home and takes control of all of their possessions. It’s a completely legal grift with few risks. Until she learns that her newest ‘client’ has a connection to organized crime.

I Care a Lot (2021) is a crime film that pits two horrible people against each other: Marla’s lawful evil versus Roman’s chaotic evil. I want to stress that Marla is not a likable person. She is charming, she’s in a loving relationship, but she is never a good person. That makes the appeal of this film kind of like a pulpy crime dark comedy. You don’t care about any of the characters, you just enjoy their quips and their dark machinations. You might root for Marla just because she’s there and she’s favored by the camera as the protagonist.

I want to talk about this film as an ‘LGBTQ Movie,’ which is the first tag listed on Netflix. Marla is in a relationship with Fran, who also works for her. In one of the first scenes, Marla tells a man that he ‘lost to a woman,’ and she equates having a vagina with being a woman and having a penis with being a man. Genitals do not equal gender, but this is a fairly common kind of subtle transphobia. As a trans person watching this, it didn’t feel good to hear the protagonist imply that I’m not a woman, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I continued watching. Major spoilers ahead.

In the final scene of this film, after Marla has conquered the world of legal guardianship and become ridiculously wealthy, she is shot and killed. She dies in Fran’s arms. Roll credits. I thought that it was pretty common knowledge by now that ‘bury your gays’ is one of the most common, boring, and depressing stereotypes for queer characters on screen, but here it is again in 2021 in an ‘LGBTQ movie’ directed by a man about two women in love. As far as I can tell, neither the director nor the actresses are queer.

Who is this for? It doesn’t feel like it’s for me as a trans woman, and it doesn’t feel like it’s for queer people either. Is it for conservatives who think the lesbian elite left is kidnapping grandmas? I really don’t know. I was excited to watch I Care a Lot because there aren’t many LGBTQ comedies, and fewer with big name actors like Rosamund Pike. It was not fun to watch.

Amy wakes up knowing that she will die tomorrow. Jane is concerned about her friend’s apparent relapse, but refuses to be hold hostage to Amy’s drunken, depressive anxiety. Jane goes home, starts looking through her microscope, and then she knows it too. She dies tomorrow.

She Dies Tomorrow (2020) is about acknowledging one’s own mortality. It’s also about the certainty that comes with anxiety. It consumes you. There’s nothing anyone can say to change your mind. Anxiety is contagious too. 

It’s an apocalyptic, singular film that is perfect for a year filled with doom and depression. Kate Lyn Sheil delivers a truly gripping performance. Jane Adams’ character progresses from eccentric to something else. I think Ms. Adams is underrated as a dramatic and comedic actress.

She Dies Tomorrow is one of the best films I’ve watched recently. It’s a completely weird story populated by strong characters. More than anything else, She Dies Tomorrow is about a feeling.

poolsofchrome :

We’re friends, aren’t we? Good friends?

Viridiana (1961) is about a nun who has a horrible experience with her abusive uncle. She feels that she has changed, and chooses to leave the convent and start a homeless center in the manor she inherits from her uncle. Her cousin, who farms on the uncle’s land, dislike her ‘paupers.’ Viridiana just wants to help people in whatever little way that she can. 

If you want to unpack some Catholic imagery, this is your film. I just read a book set during Spain’s national Catholicism, and this film feels like a rebellion against that. I think it’s also deeply pessimistic about humanity in general. Viridiana loses more and more of her faith as the film goes on. 

The thing about putting tentacles into any horror story is that they’re so inexplicable. Octopuses are basically alien lifeforms on Earth. It’s no coincidence that Cthulhu, whose appearance inspires madness, is a tentacle-based god. It’s like how a closed door is scarier than an open one. You don’t really know the why or how of tentacles, and that’s what makes them scary.

Tentacles (2021) is about a young couple renovating a house together. Aww! Tara moves to LA and meets Sam, who is still reeling from the deaths of his parents. He wants to sell their house, the one he grew up in, but Tara convinces him to fix it up and make it their own. 

I refuse to say more. Tentacles is the kind of inexplicable horror b-movie that I enjoy. I hate it when they over explain everything in horror movies. I don’t want to know what the ghost wants, just show me more moving furniture. I like it when questions like ‘why is this happening?’ are in fact part of the horror. Confusion can be horrifying, but mainstream audiences don’t like to be confused. 

This film is not perfect, and its biggest flaw is that the two main characters are just pretty boring. There’s also a lot of sex. Blumhouse’s Into the Dark series embraces low-budget made-for-tv horror, so we can forgive these things if the strong story elements are memorable. If you’re like me and enjoy b-movies with plots too weird for the big screen, I’d recommend Tentacles. But if you don’t have that particular taste for things that are actually kind of bad, probably just skip the whole series.

andythestreet:

rollerdracula

Morgan hosts a true crime podcast with Jean. They’re also ex-girlfriends who still live together. Morgan starts dating someone new, Simone, and tries to put distance between herself and Jean. But Morgan starts to suspect that Simone herself might be a serial killer.

Imagine: a lesbian dark comedy romantic thriller. Women Who Kill (2016) is about murder, but it’s also about Morgan’s fear of opening up in a committed relationship. It’s a brilliant story about secrets, suspicion, and an inability to just talk it out.

Queer filmmakers are getting to a point where they can make fun of themselves a bit. I don’t want a lesbian film about coming out or facing homophobia, I want lesbians obsessed with murder. This film is hilarious. I mean, she hosts a podcast with her ex-girlfriend whom she also lives with. For their friend’s bachelor(ette) parties, the butches go to a strip club and the femmes sit in an apartment drinking wine and opening sex toy gifts. 

I highly recommend Women Who Kill for fans of true crime podcasts and women who love women.

From 1977 until the moment of her death in 2012, Marion Stokes (pictured in the lower right corner) recorded television twenty-four hours a day on major and local news channels. 

Stokes was a librarian and a communist activist who became a commentator on a tv program that featured diverse community voices in conversation about important topics. She married a fellow panelist on the show, a relationship that was based on intelligence and shared ideas that often shut out their children.

Recording television was the project of Marion’s life. She was secretive and paranoid about her recording. At times, it created friction between her and her loved ones. The house staff who took care of her and drove her around were also tasked with replacing tapes when they were full and purchasing blank VHS tapes. She had entire apartments filled with tapes and stuff, and she could be considered a hoarder.

The difference between hoarding and collecting is perceived value. After Marion’s death, the tapes eventually found a home in the Internet Archive where they are a precious resource. The news stations were not keeping archives of their own programming, and Marion’s collection included clips that can not be found anywhere else. Her collection shows how stories are framed, the language used across channels, and how the stories changed over time. She recognized that televised news media shaped the national conversation, and she recorded it because no one else was. 

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019) is the incredible story of one woman’s mission to create a news media archive. This film shows Marion’s life through the lens of her archive. In one stunning sequence, you watch the news of the 9/11 attacks break across four major channels one after another. It’s a fascinating documentary about tv news and how to save history as it happens.

You can search Marion’s collection here at the Internet Archive.

I don’t watch a lot of movies like The Little Things (2021), murder thrillers as I call them. At the start, I thought “I don’t know how I’m going to feel about this movie about police right now.” Denzel and Rami play old meets new cops tracking a serial killer. When one of them gets into the passenger side of a car with their prime suspect behind the wheel, I thought, “cops are so stupid.” And that’s kind of how the rest of the movie goes.

I don’t want to spoil it, but this film does not offer a satisfying ending. I really felt like it was a movie about how police often do more harm than good, let emotions get in the way, and interfere with their own cases. But the ambiguous ending makes it a little unclear what to think.

I think this might actually be kind of a tired plot, as many reviewers have unfavorably compared it to Seven. I’m not sure it was a good movie either. I probably spent more time analyzing the political aspects of the film than really engaging with the story, but that’s probably because this is a film about male cops and dead women that does not pass the Bechdel Test.

Jared Leto sucks.

American Utopia (2020) is a concert film performance by David Byrne. Twelve individuals in gray suits stand barefoot on a bare stage. They carry their instruments with them. The only thing ever on stage is people. 

It’s a performance of songs from the David Byrne album of the same name, as well as some Talking Heads classics and a Janelle Monáe cover. It’s all about human connection. 

My favorite concert film ever is Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. In many ways, American Utopia feels like a spiritual sequel to that performance. It’s all about showing you how a show is put together, the decisions that are made, and focusing on the people making the music. It’s just a real joy. If you have any interest at all in Talking Heads or David Byrne, I highly recommend this concert film.

Jules and Mickey rob a convenience store. They hit the road ready to make love and make a new life in Florida. Until their car runs out of gas in the middle of the woods. Luckily, they find an empty house nearby. They search it for car keys or a way to siphon gasoline. They find a little girl chained up in the basement. Then George and Gloria come home.

Villains (2019) is Bonnie and Clyde meets Misery. Young horror icons Bill Skarsgård (It) and Maika Monroe (It Follows) have great chemistry together. This film is funny, but Jules and Mickey’s relationship made me care about them and added real tension to the film. It’s like a horror romance filled with twists and turns.

This film is really well-scripted. I just love midnight horror/thrillers like this. It has an original (enough) concept, great characters, and plenty of style. It has heart too, because Jules and Mickey actually care about something. 

Tasya Vos takes over a body, uses it for assassination, and then returns to her own skin. This is what she does for work. When a big assignment requires her to stay in a host for a few days in a row, things get weird.

It is kind of wild to me that Brandon Cronenberg is exploring the same themes of body horror that his father, director David Cronenberg, explored in all of his best films. Possessor (2020) is about forgetting who you are, trying to assert control over a body you know doesn’t belong to you. Identity is harder to cling to when you don’t recognize the face in the mirror each morning. Yet the memories of Vos’ violent killings continue to haunt her in her normal life.

I’m all for a confusing science-fiction film. Let me question who’s really in control and what’s happening, let me get lost. But don’t ask me to be confused and have an emotional moment at the same time. My heart only reacts if my brain knows what’s happening. There’s so much violence in this film, but it’s difficult to care when you don’t know who’s pulling the trigger or what’s happening. Or maybe it wasn’t actually that hard to follow, it’s just that guns are an emotional shortcut.

Once again, I have to mention that horror has a problem with disfigurement. We need to stop presenting things as terrifying that look like actual medical conditions. 

Ma Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues,’ is scheduled to record four songs with her band. The studio owner and her manager are getting tired of her showing up late, refusing to record until she gets a Coca-Cola, and insisting that her stuttering nephew record the spoken intro on one of the songs. Meanwhile Levee, the trumpeter, is causing friction within the band by positioning his own ego against Ma’s and everyone else’s.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), based on the play by August Wilson, is about one recording session in 1927. It’s about two gifted Black musicians trying to leverage their talents against the white recording industry, and sometimes against each other. I think this film is about being talented and having someone else stand in the way of your success. Ma comes off as a demanding diva, but after all that arguing, she receives the fair treatment that she knows she deserves. For Levee, who does not have Ma’s leverage, his ego fills him with anger that only ends up sabotaging himself.

The lead performances in this film are incredible. Viola Davis is unrecognizable beneath her makeup, and you can feel her presence command the room. Chadwick Boseman’s Levee is electrified with a dark rage. The supporting cast is led by the fantastic Colman Domingo.

This film also depicts Ma Rainey’s queerness in a way that doesn’t involve homophobia, which is awesome. 

Kurt, aka KurtsWorld96, is frustrated by his lack of social following. No matter what he tries, he can’t gain views or followers. He decides to stage a livestream event he calls “The Lesson,” in which he fills his rideshare car with GoPro cameras and gives his passengers poisoned water bottles. When this fails to attract an audience, he pushes further and further for the ‘wtf moments’ that will bring him fame.

Spree (2020) is shot in a found footage style. There are lots of split-screens and overlays on screen to make it look like a real livestream, with a chat and everything. It used to be that movies didn’t understand the internet, and that’s no longer true. This film moves like the internet. It makes sense in a satisfying way. 

Where it fails is when it tries to comment on ‘social media,’ particularly through the character of Jessie (played by Sasheer Zamata). When this film talks about ‘social media,’ it’s really talking about influencers who are obsessed with numbers and clout. But that’s not how most people use the internet. The average user is not broadcasting their life 24/7 to gain attention, so it’s more of a comment on celebrity culture online than it is about how most people use social media. It’s also a pretty tired message.

Joe Keery’s performance as Kurt is fantastic. He’s naive with a subtle cynicism that grows throughout the film. You can always see behind his eyes how much he wants, needs, people to like him. He’s the best part of this movie.

This film is flawed, but extremely entertaining. 

Zach and Josh talk about girls, ride their bikes, and play video games. Zach doesn’t say no when Daryl keeps asking to hang out with them, but Josh can’t stand him. A shared experience binds them together. Innocence is replaced with distrust, paranoia, and violence.

Super Dark Times (2017) is a psychological thriller about teenage fear and big mistakes. Thrillers about teenagers have a certain heightened emotion. There’s a sense that because these people aren’t done growing, anything could happen. They’re still capable of impulsively doing something extremely unexpected. 

There’s a tense cloud that hangs over Super Dark Times. It feels like ‘I’m not sure what’s going on, but this is already so dark and it is definitely going to get so much worse.’ Zach’s dreams make reality seem even more bendable, which only adds tension. 

This film is a violent depiction of teenagers losing their innocence and growing up way too quickly. If you like ‘kids on bikes,’ but wish Stranger Things was realism and even more grim, you might like Super Dark Times. 

Jack and Su need a change. Between work and their phones, they feel stuck in a boring cycle. They want to live more fulfilling lives while they can. So they turn off their phones and head to a cabin upstate for a week to reset their brain chemistry and figure out who they are. When the world ends, they don’t hear about it.

Save Yourselves! (2020) is about the experience of millennials entering their thirties: no real skills, overwhelmed with the state of the world, and attached to the internet against their will. It’s about the fear that if you turn off your phone you might miss something big. Like really big. 

This film has a respectable amount of seriousness for itself. The themes are clear, but there’s also room for the simple thrills of a sci-fi horror comedy. It’s a lot of fun and I’m glad it exists.

While mourning the death of beloved artist SOPHIE, my friend Dakota and I watched Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) without realizing that the protagonist is also named Sophie. It was a surreal coincidence.

Animation brings magic to life in this film. The castle moves in unique lumbering, shifting motions. I didn’t always perfectly understand the plot of this film, but the themes of war, age, and love are clear. I feel like this is maybe the queerest Studio Ghibli film I’ve seen. Howl’s bird tantrums sounded a lot like dysphoria to me.

On the same day that Elliott meets Mia, he receives a cancer diagnosis. As he confronts the possibility of his early death, Mia helps him navigate treatment and the two grow closer together. They get married just before he goes in for surgery. But afterwards, they have to figure out how to have a relationship that isn’t based around Elliott’s cancer.

A common criticism of the novel The Fault in Our Stars was that it romanticized illness, which I didn’t think that it did, but it’s an interesting criticism. After Everything (2018) definitely spends the first half of the film romanticizing illness. It is the thing that brings them together. Mia didn’t seem that interested in Elliott until she learned about his diagnosis, and Elliott wouldn’t have proposed to her if he didn’t think he was dying.

The second half of the film reckons with this and the two deal with the imbalance of their relationship. Elliott tries to find a new career path while Mia seeks the care and attention she didn’t receive earlier in the relationship. It’s an interesting story arc, to watch a union form and then fall apart when everything changes.

However, I didn’t feel attached to these characters, and the comedic parts of this film rarely worked for me. It’s films like this that make me feel like I don’t understand straight people, but I think in reality this is just a mediocre romantic film. 

bodymemory :

SOPHIE for CRACK Magazine
photographed by Renata Raksha

The Forbidden Room (2015) was one of my favorite films in the year it was released. In 2021, I’m still captivated by this surreal phantasmagoria of imaginary lost films.

This movie has a nesting doll-like structure. It begins with a man teaching you how to take a bath. The camera flows into the drain and we’re in a doomed submarine. A woodsman appears in the submarine, and remembers how he was searching for a kidnapped woman named Margot. Margot dreams that she’s a singer in a night club with no name, but she can’t remember who she is. The crooner takes the stage and sings a song about a man who repeatedly begs a doctor to lobotomize him in order to rid him of his lust for butts.

That song, “The Final Derriere” by Sparks, is one of the greatest original songs ever written for a film. By this point, you’ve completely forgotten how you’ve gotten here, so we go back to Margot at the club, back to kidnapped Margot, the woodsman, the submarine, the bathtub. And then we go back down again, into a volcano’s dream, a newspaper story, a mustache’s lament, etc.

There aren’t many truly great contemporary surrealists, with David Lynch being the most notable. The Forbidden Room is a celebration of film, dreams, and surrealism, all of which it sees as the same thing. It celebrates the history of cinema by imagining these fantastic titles, and while the connections between each nested story are brilliant, it’s easy to forget how you got somewhere. Because dreams don’t really begin or end, they just happen. The details fade and all you remember is the climax.

The Forbidden Room is pure imagination. It’s hilarious and inspiring. If you feel like getting lost in dream after dream, I highly recommend this singular film. If you just want a taste, watch the music video I linked above.

Women Skeletons!

Prom Night (1980) is from the golden age of slashers, when audiences were drawn to masked killers and bloody violence on screen. Everyone wanted to see the next Halloween (1978), and every slasher was judged in comparison to it. To me, slasher films represent a fear of chaos and, obviously, of being murdered by someone you don’t know. It’s a fear of a terrifying death that comes too soon. But before you die unexpectedly, life happens, and that’s what I find so interesting about horror films. The part that comes before all of the violence is a blank canvas that gets filled with characters doing what filmmakers think audiences want to see. For Prom Night, that means disco.

Prom Night is weird. It starts with kids playing hide and seek in an abandoned building. When a new kid joins the game, the others terrorize her until she accidentally falls out of a window. The four living children swear that they will never tell a soul about their involvement in the girl’s death. Most horror films start with a shock, but this one begins with a children’s game that goes on far too long and an accidental death. It’s a strange backstory that doesn’t provide the kind of thrills you want in a slasher.

Six years later, it’s the day of prom. Kim and Nick are the queen and king of prom, but Wendy is jealous, so she plans her Carrie-like vengeance against Kim. Once we get to prom, the disco music starts, which is such an excellent soundtrack for a slasher movie. I only wish there was more of it. Kim and Nick perform a dance routine to show Wendy what they can do, which is literally a full dance scene in the middle of a slasher. 

The masked killer goes around killing people. Besides a notable dance floor beheading, most of the murders are pretty gore-free. Some of them even take place in slow motion, which is an interesting/kind of annoying choice. When the killer is finally revealed, the film ends abruptly. It’s a disappointing ending that doesn’t do justice to the characters we’re supposed to identify with throughout the film. 

Prom Night is a funny installment in the scream queen career of Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s also fun to think of as a disco horror film, and certainly part of the ‘dance horror’ canon that I’m obsessed with uncovering. It reminded me of Climax (2018) because of this, and also The Lure (2015) with its heavy disco soundtrack.

Ko Yun-ju is an unemployed academic who strained by his marriage, with a baby on the way. He’s angry about the unfairness in his field, where bribery seems like the only path forward. All of his frustrations are manifested by the yappy dog living in his apartment complex, which he decides to kill. 

Park Hyun-nam is a bookkeeper for the apartment complex who dreams of sudden fame, like the woman who makes the news by fighting off a bank robber. She notices that dogs have been going missing, and sees an opportunity to be a hero by catching the local dog murderer.

Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) is a dark comedy and the feature directorial debut of Bong Joon-ho. I think it’s about how social inequities don’t reflect any kind of moral high ground. The central characters all have different levels of social status and wealth, and they all take part in some kind of criminal activity. There’s a janitor who likes to cook the dead dogs into a stew in the basement, and a homeless man who tries to steal it. Hyun-nam tries to stop a dog-napper, but she and her “best friend” (they’re a little gay) also kick a mirror off a stranger’s car for fun. Yun-ju of course commits the cruelest animal murders. But this is a film about social injustice.

This is a dark comedy that does include two dog murders (though the deaths happen off-screen). Yun-ju is an incredibly unlikeable character, but I really got into the film when Hyun-nam gets more screen time. She’s played by the wonderful Bae Doona, and I really liked her character. I’d recommend this film if you liked Parasite as there are many parallels between the two, or if you just like dark comedy crime films from the 00s and 90s.

eunnieboo :

cuddle 💕

The Times of Bill Cunningham (2018) explores the life of famed street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham in his own words. The film is based around an interview between Cunningham and director Mark Bozek that occurred in 1994. 

The best parts of the interview with Bill are when he reveals something about his life or process. He constantly denies that he has any talent, and insists that he is a documenter of fashion rather than a photographer. He was always more interested in what everyday people were choosing to wear rather than what the celebrities and designers were doing at big events. Bill only alludes to his sexuality, and he openly cries at two different points about the AIDS crisis. Much of the interview feels like celebrity gossip though. Cunningham has known a lot of famous people, and he has a lot of stories to share about them. 

The interview is padded with Sarah Jessica Parker narrating the gaps in Cunningham’s story of his own life, but sometimes the two of them repeat each other. There are these awful sections where Cunningham’s photographs play like an iMovie slideshow with the same Moby songs from 2002 that everyone’s already used in everything. One song even plays twice in a row. 

The heart of this film is a special interview with Bill Cunningham. It shows his internal conflict between the Catholic Church and his homosexuality, even though he cannot address this directly. I think it shows someone who’s really lonely and in love with fashion. The rest of the documentary feels like it’s there to bump the runtime up to 76 minutes. The parts of this film do not connect, and the extraneous parts did nothing for me.

fuckyeahmovieposters :

Dark Star

Submitted by Picture & Video

Four astronauts have been drifting through space for twenty years. Destroying planets as part of their mission is their only sense of purpose or joy. There’s a pet alien that no one wants to feed, a malfunctioning laser, and the commander is cryogenically frozen somewhere on a lower deck.

Dark Star (1974) is weirdly a great quarantine movie. The crew often rubs each other the wrong way, always cramped in their small control center. They’re looking for any kind of recreation, like reckless target practice, and they’re all reading a lot. They miss life on Earth, and they’re starting to wonder what the point of it all is. 

John Carpenter’s directorial feature debut is a low-budget treat. It’s a comedy, but it manages to do more than that too. It’s a character-driven story, which almost gives it the feel of a tv show. The film is basically a student project that was expanded to create a feature release. Writer/actor Dan O’Bannon said of Dark Star, “We had what would have been the world’s most impressive student film and it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

If you’re a fan of Carpenter or O’Bannon’s work (he wrote Alien), then I think Dark Star is really enjoyable as a science fiction film that parodies the genre while still wholeheartedly indulging in it. It’s easy to see traces that would later show up in The Thing and Alien. As I said before, I think this film has some understanding of what it’s like to be in quarantine, which is refreshing.

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017) is a documentary that aims to encapsulate the vast scope and size of the New York Public Library, which includes 92 branches serving communities with unique needs. This film is 197 minutes long (that’s three hours and seventeen minutes), and I watched it over two days.

This film is basically a series of vignettes. You get a few intro shots of street corners that give context for each location’s environment, and then you’re inside a library program, meeting, or event. There’s no up or down to this film, no arc, you’re just thrust into the NYPL, and you stay there until it’s over.

A large portion of the film consists of author talks or performances. The film opens with Richard Dawkins talking about ignorance, which leads him to the importance of education. These talks are some of my least favorite parts because they’re often about a topic seemingly unrelated to libraries, but maybe with a film of this length it’s necessary to take some detours. The library director meetings are a little dull, but it’s impressive to hear the kind of big talk and big decisions that must be made for an organization of this size.

The best parts are the library programs, such as teenagers building robots, people learning how to read Braille, a jobs expo, internet access. One of the first sequences of librarians answering reference questions is hilarious and human. The other great element of this film is the various library processes and collections. Watching people quietly photograph a book for an archive is really delightful, or hearing someone explain the image collection or a rare print collection. These were the most intriguing parts of the film for me.

I’m obviously passionate about libraries, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have watched a 3+ hour film about them. I recommend it if you’re also passionate about libraries, or even if you’re just interested in organizations in general. If this film has a theme, it’s that libraries are really a cornerstone of democracy in several ways. They provide access to education for everyone, and they’re a place for free speech. The NYPL gives me that same sense of vertigo I get when I think about NYC itself. This place is so big, how does it all work? I feel a little closer to understanding how the NYPL works, but it’s somehow even more impressive.

devnaut :

areax :

Jed portrayed the shapeshifting alien taking the form of a Norwegian dog in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Jed was half-wolf, half Canadian malamute, and according to Carpenter, was an excellent animal actor—after becoming familiar with the cast and crew, he would not look at the camera, crew, or dolly during scenes. Jed’s quiet manner perfectly reflected the alien’s unsettling nature. Jed would go on to act in a few other movies, and lived on his trainer Clint Rowe’s animal sanctuary until his death at age eighteen—quite old for a dog of his breed.

literally where is his oscar

silenceformysoul :

Francesco Hayez - Meditation, 1850

one boob out and she’s still too sad to read.

lylylylylylylylyly: