The Atomik

Extra-Fancy Errata

[fr33tobm3-deactivated20160118]

The continually inspiring magic of HRT. Live your truth!

[flamingofairy-blog]

This makes me so fucking happy

[lorileadfoot-deactivated2020072]

Bless em!! Major support for brave trans sisters.

[letsflybutterfly]

So proud to be on this post with so many amazing trans people ❤️

[atomic-atomika]

shout out to my girls @letsflybutterfly and @mytransgenderjourney

you babes have been my inspiration for a long damn time <3

[atomic-atomika]

MOVIE REVIEW: Trainwreck - A Tale of Three Amys -- or -- Thomas Kincaide is a shitty artist and worse human being

There’s a moment in the early meet-cute phase of Aaron (Bill Hader) and Amy’s (Amy Schumer) courtship where during a telling of his life story, he relays the tale of his first kiss: to a girl in seventh grade, the unfortunately named Jennifer Jennifer (which is doubly funny for myself, as I knew a Stacy Stacy in my matriculation), who needed to stand upon a rock to smooch with her tall and gangly beau.  Aaron describes the moment as “something out of Norman Rockwell,” and in that moment anyone with the most marginal awareness of Americana in the last 100 years knows what he means -- idyllic, romantic, almost cartoonishly wholesome.  While this shorthand is indeed ingrained into the collective American consciousness, I still find it interesting that the movie drops the painter’s name, as it unfolds with a similar warmth, humanity, and eerily uncanny semblance of real life . . . while also ultimately projecting exaggerated comforts in the mundane.

While I suppose I could spend a few paragraphs extolling the virtues of the film’s more responsible and true-to-life depictions of the various stages of romance and relationships, given the involvement of Judd Apatow here such concepts seem assumed to begin with; not to accuse Apatow or his brand here of being staid or boring at all, but his verisimilitude has been his calling card for over a decade now -- it’s just what we expect.  And it’s a good thing, no worries, as Schumer here dives right into the character-driven struggles of real life coupling, assuring us we’re not getting anything too typical of what “rom-com” has come to mean.

However, subversion of the expected romantic comedy tropes is this film’s bread and butter, starting with Schumer first and foremost.  Her character here is good at her job, but not great, and has struggles of the very normcore variety -- sick dad, spotty family relationships, questions of purpose -- but what is gloriously absent is any trope of weird writing crutch manifested by the character’s self-imposed rules for sexual relationships; Schumer’s Amy simply doesn’t want to get involved with people, because the only forms of relationships she has seen up close (her parents’ failed marriage and her sister’s strange husband and stepson) are not what she’s looking for.  She’s not engaging in random hookups because she’s lost and in a shame spiral, she just doesn’t know what a healthy relationship even looks like, so she’s not going to try.  Thankfully, the film doesn’t shame her for what would be taken in other films as dangerous promiscuity.

However, the film provides conflict of the more puritanical sort by way of Bill Hader’s Aaron, the famous and successful doctor from a wealthy conservative background, and this is where the film starts to buckle under the weight of conflicting messages, and from this hook the throughline ends with a confoundingly muddled message.  So much of this film seems to (rightly) cast Amy as the open-minded outsider lost in a sea of cultural expectation, so when the film has her finding solace and emotional tranquility in embracing aspects of external forces that were grating on her, I’m not sure what exactly the fuck is going on here -- other than the sprinkling of schmaltz that Apatow hasn’t learned to kick yet. 

The Three Amys (spoilers)

1. Amy Schumer wrote and starred in this film, and anyone familiar with her work can see how much of her comedy and outlook leak into the script, as there’s very little of her character that isn’t taken from her stand-up persona.  She’s blunt, acerbic, profane, but never reveling in raunch the way many other lesser comics might, all the while displaying profoundly body-positive feminist ideology.  Schumer knows that she’s not Kiera Knightly or Kate Upton, but that’s fine because neither of those girls has ever made me laugh while being truthful.  Oh, and Schumer is ridiculously attractive, and her confidence her own beauty makes her more appealing than a busload of supermodels (which is a lot, since you can probably sit three to a seat).

2. So why does movie Amy not sell for me, when she’s 95-ish% autobiography, an avatar for Schumer’s comedic and political philosophy that mimics her in almost every way?  Because of that fucking schmaltzy unearned one-sided ending, that’s fucking why!  Amy and Aaron separate after a huge fight were he accuses her of being lazy, unmotivated, addicted to drugs and booze, harmful to his productivity, and not involved enough in his interests -- none of which I found to be fair at all, as none of those accusations had much support in the film.  Amy had a good job and took great care of her invalid father, was vying for a senior-level promotion at her workplace, the drugs and booze were never shown to be an “addiction” in any rational sense that hindered her life (until the ridiculous situation at the end with the intern which was the stupidest part of an otherwise pretty good movie), Aaron’s work being affected by her was 100% his fault, and she showed several times in the film to support his interests and the one time she didn’t was when she was forced out of the situation by her employer.

3. I don’t know what to make of this, and maybe I need more time with it, or to read competing interpretations, or maybe a second viewing, because I did not like the conclusion the movie came to.  In the end, to right her chaotic life, Amy finds solace in the familial embrace (literally, here) of her aloof sister and her weird husband and even weirder stepson.  Then, after throwing out all her booze and marijuana, she accepts a job at an even better company, writes a popular article that makes her estranged paramour even more popular and famous, and then stages an elaborately choreographed dance routine with the help of several dozen professional athletes (despite her repeated stated aversions to sports and sports culture).  It seems as though this relationship ended at an appropriate point where the two of them could no longer find common ground: Aaron thought Amy too coarse, too vulgar, prone to vice, critical of his interests, and too quick to jump in the sack with others -- Amy, meanwhile, found Aaron too superficial, wanting of a traditional family life she did not, uptight, and self-absorbed.  The scenes where they’re arguing about these things rang so true to me because I’ve had those conversations before, and I’m sure I will again, and even if as a couple you choose to keep fighting you can’t simply ignore those incompatible truths.  In that light, the film’s climax with Amy’s ridiculous grand gesture, her voluntary bonding with her sister’s family, and her willingness to give so much of herself away, rings like the absolute pinnacle of hoary bullshit.  However, the really awful thing is that Aaron doesn’t change shit about anything in his boring right-wing fantasy life and still gets the girl.

(End spoilers)

Getting back to that Norman Rockwell thing, the reason why I found it such a strangely prophetic mention is because of how this movie made me feel about it when it was over.  Okay, so bear with me.  Look at this painting:

What do we see?  We see a scene of intense familial warmth, photorealistic in the extreme (certainly so for 1940 or whenever this was painted), with incredible attention to detail.  Reality is just leaking out at every pore here, down to the cuff buttons on the towhead’s jacket.  But that’s just the problem, isn’t it?  Despite Rockwell’s hallmark realism, your brain never confuses one of his paintings for reality.  Now have a look at this:

This is Mark.  Or better yet, this is “Mark,” a painting done by hyperrealist Chuck Close.  That is not a photograph, that is art done on canvas by hand.  And our poor subject is not the most conventionally attractive fellow, but he at least looks very realistic.  We don’t need much distance from him to mistake him for the real thing, even though we may not know what exactly lies beyond that glaikit gaze that may or may not be from his driver’s license picture.

Getting to some sort of point here, if Close’s painting is an out-of-context depiction without emotion, why do we buy the “realness” of it much more readily than Rockwell’s emotion-packed scene of homecoming?  I argue it’s because we don’t believe it.  Just look at that scene -- there are like two dozen fucking people in that thing and they’re all acting like they just won the sex lottery and tickets to the Super Bowl.  However, take the subject of the painting (the faceless man in the coat (and yes, it’s a man, because this was painted in 1930-whatever and short hair and warm homecomings for lesbians didn’t exist until 1973)) on his own and pair him with any single other person in the frame, and the painting feels very different.  Every single loving gaze and smile and grin belies a separate history and relationship; individually that tells a story -- two dozen at once is a level of emotionality and complexity that the human mind doesn’t rightly comprehend.  Those situations don’t exist in real life, or if they do, they happen so infrequently that seeing them depicted feels dishonest and false -- Rockwell’s work is like stock photos, but with magic hour lighting and a high concentration of the warm fuzzies.  This film is Rockwell, striving for intense realism, but it can’t sell the verisimilitude because the tone and emotion ends up being all wrong and uncanny and our minds won’t believe it.

But contrast that with someone like Thomas Kinkade, who made millions and millions of dollars selling the framed art equivalent of a runny shit:

I mean seriously, what the fuck is this?  Kinkade’s entire portfolio looks like this crap -- some warmly-lit church or cottage against a snowy forest captured at some mythical time of the day where it is both sunset and sunrise, and there’s always some goddamned babbling brook in the frame.  For real.  Like, 100% of the time there’s this brook.  Motherfucker loved him some brooks.

But people love Kinkade!  He’s dead now, but the shitbag was worth over $50 million when he died.  He sold these artless husks on a pitch of Christianity-inspired talent, and the holy-rollers ate that shit up as they are wont to do; one of my favorite moments in my whole life was getting to tell my evangelical grandmother about how her favorite artist died from an alcohol-assisted drug overdose in the arms of his mistress.  If you get a minute, read up on the guy, he was an impressively shitty human being (and the best part is that he didn’t even paint most of his work, he paid other people to do it).

This is how I see traditional depictions of Hollywood romance, though.  No part of this is natural, and no part of this is anything real people even have memory of -- just this weird collective hive-mind agreed-upon imagery of what the ideal should look like.  “Men act like this, women act like that,” and so on.  There are no real people or situations that occur in any semblance of real life, there’s just images of what we already project as a culture as the ideal reflected back to us.  It’s a tautological fallacy, almost; “This is an accurate representation because it is the same as other representations that self-report as accurate.”  If A equals B, then A equals B must be true.  And so on.  But it’s not, clearly, and no one with a working frontal lobe looks at a Kinkade thinking that they’re looking at any place that exists or ever existed outside the wank-bank of your average Sunday School teacher.  Men DO NOT act like this, women DO NOT act like that, but we perpetuate a cycle with those films that reinforce those lies, which serves only to disappoint us when those lies prove themselves so, which then leads to more anxiety about what part of us is broken because we don’t fit the mold the repetitive messages these films tell us we should.

Every romantic comedy that ends with telling the audience “love is all we need” is just another shitty Thomas Kinkade painting; hollow, swindling, manipulative, and artless.  And while Trainwreck doesn’t go that far, winding up squarely in Rockwell’s wheelhouse is a huge disappointment for a film that spent most of its running time convincing us it was Chuck Close.

[atomic-atomika]

I’m stealing this from deathcultdyke

Age: 33

Biggest fear: not achieving my dreams, junebugs

Current time: 9:27 am

Drink you last had: Caffeine Free Diet Coke

Easiest person to talk to: . . . uh . . . good question

Favourite song of all time: no favorites, but “Sprawl II” by Arcade Fire is pretty great

Grossest memory: I work in an ER.  I couldn’t possibly pick out the “grossest.”  My life is gross.

Hometown: Dallas, TX

In love with: my wifey

Killed someone: Nope.  But I did stab someone in the head, once

Longest relationship: current, 7 years

Middle name: Rose

Number of siblings: one brother

One wish: time machine to go back and have a conversation with pre-teen me

Person I last called: wifey

Question you are always asked: “you okay?”

Reason to smile: Elliot, video games, friends

Song you last sang: “Beans and Cornbread” by Louis Jordan

Time you woke up: 5:45 am.  Bleh.

Underwear colour: Actually not wearing any right now  O_o

Vacation destination: Canada, Colorado, Seattle

Worst habit: burps

X-Ray: I’ve only ever broken my hand when I was a kid, but I have an extra rib on the right side.  It kinda hurts sometimes.

Favourite food: Mushroom rice.  Or ribeye.  No, no, sushi!  Wait, . . . I dunno.

spagka jennaxwade 

[atomic-atomika]

MOVIE REVIEW: Mad Max - Fury Road

(for Kayla <3) I expect most people came into this movie expecting a high-octane action smorgasbord, and in a way, they got it. However, this movie is a classic bait-and-switch, and as I sat there watching this starkly and pointedly anti-patriarchal condemnation of The World of Men™, I couldn't help but grin at the thought of all the dudebros and meatheads in theaters across the country twisting in their seats as it all unfolded; the fact that the pre-film trailers for my showing were for a bunch of bro-tastic schlock (oh, Vin Diesel, you walking Ed Hardy cartoon) just made it all that much sweeter. Oh, man, though. Where to start? This movie is got so much going on, and it just slam dunks everything. Action? BAM!. Character? BLAM! Deeply symbolic narrative tying imagery to a greater throughline exploring the ingraining of misogyny through iconography and dogmatic ritual? GET DUNKT ON. And then it all explodes in an orgy of practical effects and red dirt. Yes, the action is fantastic and novel and almost unceasing; in a two-hour run time, it felt like a good hour-forty was just one single chase scene, and that ain't bad. Director George Miller puts on a master class of dynamic characterization, defining characters through their actions and reactions instead just having bland cutouts talk about each other with adjectives. In a way I was very surprised to see, this film recalled to me THX-1138, and more specifically the way that George Lucas described his process in that film as not making a movie about the future, but making a movie from the future. Fury Road feels like a movie from the Wasteland. Maybe you know who Max Rockatansky is going into this film, maybe you don't, but either way it doesn't matter because this story is going to make you live in this world for 120 minutes up close and gritty-like without holding the scrap-metal prosthesis that used to be your hand. It's going to throw terms and slang at you and not give a dandy fuck if you aren't too good with context clues to put the pieces together. It's going to use symbolism time and time again to tell the story of how the ego of men continues to destroy all things in the mad pursuit of vanity and greed, and if you don't like the story that tells then the story suggests you may be part of the problem. Let's talk about that symbolism, shall we? Everything on-screen is information, not a shot wasted, and it shows a world tyrannically ruled by the vile Immortan Joe and his family -- his muscle-bound meathead son, Rictus Erectus, and his brothers Bullet Farmer (the avatar of the military/industrial complex) and People Eater (the avatar of aristocratic sloth and decadence) -- while Joe himself, in his medal-adorned false muscle suit and death's-head codpiece, is the distilled essence of aging machismo. This isn't so much a world built of rules and consequence, but rather a broad impressionistic satire of the gender codes of our own world; Joe and his family prize above all the masculine ideal, strength and power and the ability to harm, and everything else is either a means to that end or an obstacle to it. Women in Joe's kingdom have but two roles within his castle walls -- sexual object or mother -- and it's brilliant how Miller points out the masculine dissonance that wants to believe that those two are separate and exclusive states. Joe keeps a harem of nubile teenage slaves to slake his lust, but the product of these unions are given to Milk Mothers, wet nurses who perform the actual duties of motherhood (and also provide Joe's family with the only real nourishment they have), so that the girls may be returned to their coital duties. And then his girls, his "property" are stolen, setting the whole movie into motion, and only once does someone in Joe's clan remark upon the wastefulness of sending an entire army to war over a personal affront. And Joe's army puts the "waste" in wasteland, as we are constantly reminded how rare resources are in this world the whole while the armada of cars and trucks and guns and flame-throwers barrel across the scorched desert for no discernible gain. Every concern with Joe and his revhead Warboys is about the immediate, and he keeps them in line with his cult built on reincarnation, martyrdom, and above all, service to Immortan Joe himself. Nicholas Holt plays Nux, the Warboy who begins to question his place in Joe's world, and through him we see the mindless adherence instilled into this flock by elevating the mundane to the sacred and surrounding it with ritual. Joe's cannon-fodder army of fallout-stricken idiots don't just catch bullets for him, they "go to Valhalla" to be with the heroes, and their martyrdom is "witnessed" by group genuflection and a bizarre rite in which the mouths of the soon-to-be-deceased are sprayed with chrome, just another elevation of trappings of Joe's maniacal church, where death is the altar and gears and gasoline are the stations of the cross. Even their tattoos and brandings are of gears and engine schematics. An interesting thing I noticed was how Miller treats the violence in this film; it's not something that I would say is overtly glorified. It seems like there are probably two dozen spectacular wrecks in this film, but I can't recall a single one filmed in the typical slow-motion, god-camera pornographic coverage that ensures you don't miss any part of the mayhem which is the standard today in most empty-headed cinematic explosionfests. Miller, for a film that is most violent, does not for one minute revere any of this violence. We get no lingering money shots of aftermath, no reveling in the bloody destruction of the many bodies in the wake, no emotional death scenes to find glory in, no retaliatory brutal end for our baddies. Miller kills people left and right in this film, sometimes severely so, but he seems to share the sentiment of his badass elderly lady marksman/motorcycle bandit, who longs for a day when being good at killing people wasn't a necessary skill. Even the painfully grim death of key villain Immortan Joe is quick and pulled away from, the most confirmation we get of it is the proclamation of another character. Miller ingeniously understands what Zack Snyder failed to with Sucker Punch: you can't condemn objectification at the same time you're guilty of it. The cast is really well put together, and this is definitely Charlize Theron's film, and she carries the hell out of it. If Marvel has any sense, they're sending her the contract for Captain Marvel right now, because this is the best heroine performance since Ellen Ripley. It's hard, it's nuanced, it's brazen and raw, and Theron shines in every scene she's in. I'm having trouble articulating just how impressive this performance is for prominently having Furiosa's humanity and femininity to shine through while never copping to hoary tropes or making her simply a dude with tits; the history of cinema is littered with women put in the same boxes that Immortan Joe separates his possessions into, mothers and sex objects, and Furiosa in simply refusing to be placed on any part in the scale of objectification becomes an iconoclast. Her most dangerous act of rebellion is making people realize they don't have to fit in someone else's box. I could probably go on and on, but I'll rest here for now. I look forward to everyone seeing this. It's really something special.

[boundarymodels-deactivated20170]

Happy girl

[atomic-atomika]

Look at this babe!

[mtfconfessions]

9481) Nothing makes me hate my body more than going shopping for clothes.

Large band bras with small cups? Either not carried or really expensive. Shoes in my size? Closest they have is an 11, maybe a 12. I wear a 13. I just want to cry afterwards.

[atomic-atomika]

This

[atomic-atomika]

Millionaire Kevin Smith finds new and exciting ways to be shitty

[linchona]

Furiosa by Rahzzah

[gottawatchit]

Elementary 3×16, ‘For All You Know’: The persistence of memory

Is Sherlock Holmes a killer?  Elementary is back from a brief hiatus and brings us a really great stand-alone episode that takes a look into our boy’s troubled past with drug abuse, and examines the very fabric of what makes us who we really are in any given moment. Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…

[atomic-atomika]

Hey, friends! A really good episode! TW: drug use

[atomic-atomika]

You know I'm definitely going to see this, right?

[gottawatchit]

Elementary 3×15, ‘When Your Number’s Up’: Eat the Rich

The format changes up a bit this week by showing us exactly who the killer is right off the bat, and it’s perennial TV staple Alicia Witt!  You know, the redhead from Friday Night Lights.  And Justified.  And Law & Order.  And The Mentalist.  And House of Lies.  And Ally McBeal. Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…

[gottawatchit]

Elementary 3×14, ‘The Female of the Species’: A horse of a different taxonomy

Elementary’s got lady problems this week, y’all.  Dead boyfriends, angry dads, existential crises, jailhouse femmes fatale, pregnant zebras … the whole shebang.  I mean, even the word “shebang” is rife with female allusion! Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…

[livinglikelauryn]

I can't be the only one...

Am I the only one who thinks that the American “Sherlock” Elementary is a complete mockery of everything Sherlock? How can you compare Natalie Dormer to Andrew Scott?

[yeahbeeswax]

You can’t.

[karatam]

[professorspork]

#The best part about this show is that the gifs aren’t even used ironically#It is irene saying that people who can’t imagine that moriarty could be a woman have small minds and lack imagination#she is literally speaking to those parts of fandom #It is amazhing

[hoodoo-chyle]

Laverne Cox Cast As Transgender Attorney In CBS Pilot 'Doubt'

Laverne Cox already made history, becoming the first openly transgender actor to earn an Emmy nomination for her breakout role on Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black. 

Yaaaaaassssssss! Go Laverne!

[gottawatchit]

Elementary 3×11, ‘The Illustrious Client’: You get further with a smile and a nightstick than just a smile alone

This week finds us with the first half of a rare two-part tale on Elementary, and I’m sorry to say that it’s a big stinking pile of disappointment.  This is obviously the crescendo Kitty’s narrative progression has been building to, and … . the story just kinda fumbles it away.  It’s a dang shame, too, as this episode does something I love and that this program only does two or three times a year: having a case where the mystery wholly involves the personal lives of our main characters. Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…

[atomic-atomika]

*dry farting sound*

[gottawatchit]

Elementary 3×10, ‘Seed Money’: Blood orchids

This week’s Elementary is a lovely romp through the delicate world of botany and home gardening.  It also features a murderous drug cartel, because what’s a day in the garden without a little homicide?  Junior Detective Kitty returns to the forefront after a few weeks on the bench as Sherlock and Joan hunt down clues to solve the mystery of who killed the dude with the really, really primo weed (here’s something I bet you never saw coming: it’s the rich white people again). Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…

[atomic-atomika]

Do ya like botany? Or murder? Well, you're gonna love this . . .

[gottawatchit]

Elementary 3×09, ‘The Eternity Injection’: The tedium of sobriety

Take down the tree, pack away the tinsel, and snuff out that menorah: the New Year is here and Elementary is back!  You can leave the leftover cookies, though, I’ll take those.  Thank you.  Mmgphff.  Vrmy gufp.  Fhamks.  Oh, fruitcake?  Oh, no, I couldn’t.  I mean, I could, but I won’t, because fruitcake is awful and I’d rather eat live beetles. Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…

[atomic-atomika]

Welcome back!  Tune in!  Watch Elementary!