Being transgender is not an easy thing. No one wakes up one day and decides they want to try on the opposite gender and by the next week they’ve completely transitioned. Trans people often explain that they realized they were assigned the wrong gender in early childhood but didn’t have the language for what was happening until they were older.
Once they’ve come to terms with who they are and share it with others, they can lose friends, become isolated from family members, and sometimes lose their livelihood. Coming out as transgender even in today’s more culturally aware world is not for the weak because it may suddenly feel like the weight of the world is upon you while you simultaneously have dwindling support.
In one man’s story, he explains that one of his biggest fears was losing his mom’s love, but instead she turned into his most supportive advocate.
Tiq Milan recently shared the beautiful story of his late mother’s evolving and unwavering support with Moth Stories on Instagram. He opens the video by explaining that he was his mother’s fourth daughter.
“When I was 15, I sat my mother down and I said, ‘Mommy, I got something to tell you,’ and she said, ‘Aww sh*t.’ And I said, ‘Ma, I’m gay,” Milan reveals.
He says his mom quickly became his fiercest ally but wanted to know why he dressed so “mannish,” inquiring why Milan, (who still hadn’t come out as trans at the time) couldn’t be softer like Ellen DeGeneres.
“Now as a transgender person, what we know is that we may lose everybody that we thought loved us and I was scared that I was going to lose her,” Milan says before revealing that he eventually told his mom he was a man.
The day of his top surgery his mom showed up. There was no anger or disappointment in her child, just love and grief. Milan explains that his mother felt as if her daughter died in that moment, acknowledging that he wasn’t the only one experiencing a transition. The story continues to unfold with deep joy and gratitude that causes commenters to cry.
Milan’s story will be featured in Moth Stories anthology “A Point of Beauty,” which can be pre-ordered here. But you can watch Milan’s heartwarming video below (brief profanity heads-up):
A father from Syracuse, New York, is getting a lot of cheers (and a few jeers) for a letter he wrote on behalf of the Tooth Fairy that he gave to his 10-year-old daughter. The message? Your room needs to be cleaner for us to give you any money.
The situation started after the girl’s parents forgot to help the Tooth Fairy out.
“We had forgotten to play the part of the tooth fairy, and when she woke up in the morning, she was disappointed,” the father, who wanted to remain anonymous, told Newsweek. “Since we had been trying to get her to clean her room for a long time, it provided an opportunity to learn a light-hearted lesson.”
So, the dad left the young girl a note from the Tooth Fairy on her official letterhead that claimed that her agents couldn’t “retrieve” her tooth on two separate occasions because her room was too messy.
The letter was on official letterhead with the address 100 Castle Lane in Fairyland.
“The state of your room prevented us from performing a midnight retrieval,” the letter read. “The first attempt almost resulted in tragedy as one of our agents’ shoes got stuck to something icky on the floor. While attempting to free herself, a pile of socks tipped over and nearly suffocated her.”
Given the two previous failures, the Tooth Fairy was forced to have a rare “daytime retrieval” and a “grumpy” fairy named Greta to do the dirty work. Greta was successful and left the young girl some change.
The Tooth Fairy finished the letter with a warm thank you. “We also know that you have a choice when it comes to tooth disposal, and we appreciate the opportunity to meet this need. Kind regards, The Tooth Fairy.”
He later posted the letter on Reddit, where it brought a smile to many people’s faces because of the formal way that it was written. “It is silly to have this image of a fairy in your head that deals with young children and communicates like an adult,” the father told Newsweek.
“This is gorgeous. She will remember receiving this letter her entire life,” SuggestionIll2192 wrote in the comments. “This is fantastic! I have a messy kid who I straight up forgot to get the last tooth from. She had to remind me to remind the tooth fairy….Going to use my own version of this with the next one, thank you for the idea!” Seatthetruthadded.
However, some people on the online forum aren’t too happy with the letter, claiming that the parents were manipulating their daughter. “Really surprised people are rooting for turning the Tooth Fairy into a guilt trip for a child,” Yadayadabisuqe wrote. “Nothing like shaming your child into cleaning her room. There have to be better way to do that than this,” VintageTimex added.
In the end, the girl gets her reward from the Tooth Fairy, but do her parents see any changes in her cleanliness after the letter? “
A lot of people have asked, and the answer is no, the note did not have any lasting cleanliness effects,” the father said.
Ancient sage Obi-Wan Kenobi once remarked, “Your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them.” Well, he’s right, kinda.
Our eyes bring in information and it’s our brain’s job to decipher the image and determine what we’re seeing. But our brains aren’t always correct. In fact, sometimes they can be so wrong we wonder if we are accurately interpreting reality at all.
After all, our brain can only label things if it knows that they are. If you lived on a deserted island your whole life and a cow showed up on the beach, you’d have no idea what to label it.
The latest baffling image that’s making people across the internet doubt their senses is a picture tweeted out by Twitter user nayem. “If you can see a beach, ocean sky, rocks and stars then you are an artist,” the comment reads.
But some people who see it also think it looks like a car door. What do you see?
If your brain told you the picture is of a lovely evening laying on the beach then you’re definitely an optimist. But, according to the person who posted it, the photo is of the bottom of a rusted out car door. Not very romantic, is it?
Here’s what Twitter users thought about the illusion.
Imagine you’re working at a school and one of the kids is starting to act up. What do you do?
Traditionally, the answer would be to give the unruly kid detention or suspension.
But in my memory, detention tended to involve staring at walls, bored out of my mind, trying to either surreptitiously talk to the kids around me without getting caught or trying to read a book. If it was designed to make me think about my actions, it didn’t really work. It just made everything feel stupid and unfair.
But Robert W. Coleman Elementary School has been doing something different when students act out: offering meditation.
Instead of punishing disruptive kids or sending them to the principal’s office, the Baltimore school has something called the Mindful Moment Room instead.
The room looks nothing like your standard windowless detention room. Instead, it’s filled with lamps, decorations, and plush purple pillows. Misbehaving kids are encouraged to sit in the room and go through practices like breathing or meditation, helping them calm down and re-center. They are also asked to talk through what happened.
Meditation and mindfulness are pretty interesting, scientifically.
Mindful meditation has been around in some form or another for thousands of years. Recently, though, science has started looking at its effects on our minds and bodies, and it’s finding some interesting effects.
One study, for example, suggested that mindful meditation could give practicing soldiers a kind of mental armor against disruptive emotions, and it can improve memory too. Another suggested mindful meditation could improve a person’s attention span and focus.
Individual studies should be taken with a grain of salt (results don’t always carry in every single situation), but overall, science is starting to build up a really interesting picture of how awesome meditation can be. Mindfulness in particular has even become part of certain fairly successful psychotherapies.
Back at the school, the Mindful Moment Room isn’t the only way Robert W. Coleman Elementary has been encouraging its kids.
The meditation room was created as a partnership with the Holistic Life Foundation, a local nonprofit that runs other programs as well. For more than 10 years the foundation has been offering the after-school program Holistic Me, where kids from pre-K through the fifth grade practice mindfulness exercises and yoga.
“It’s amazing,” said Kirk Philips, the Holistic Me coordinator at Robert W. Coleman. “You wouldn’t think that little kids would meditate in silence. And they do.”
There was a Christmas party, for example, where the kids knew they were going to get presents but were still expected to do meditation first.”As a little kid, that’s got to be hard to sit down and meditate when you know you’re about to get a bag of gifts, and they did it! It was beautiful, we were all smiling at each other watching them,” said Philips.
The kids may even be bringing that mindfulness back home with them. In the August 2016 issue of Oprah Magazine, Holistic Life Foundation co-founder Andres Gonzalez said: “We’ve had parents tell us, ‘I came home the other day stressed out, and my daughter said, “Hey, Mom, you need to sit down. I need to teach you how to breathe.'”
The program also helps mentor and tutor the kids, as well as teach them about the environment.
They help clean up local parks, build gardens, and visit nearby farms. Philips said they even teach kids to be co-teachers, letting them run the yoga sessions.
This isn’t just happening at one school, either. Lots of schools are trying this kind of holistic thinking, and it’s producing incredible results.
In the U.K., for example, the Mindfulness in Schools Project is teaching adults how to set up programs. Mindful Schools, another nonprofit, is helping to set up similar programs in the United States.
Oh, and by the way, the schools are seeing a tangible benefit from this program, too.
Philips said that at Robert W. Coleman Elementary, there have been exactly zero suspensions last year and so far this year. Meanwhile, nearby Patterson Park High School, which also uses the mindfulness programs, said suspension rates dropped and attendance increased as well.
Is that wholly from the mindfulness practices? It’s impossible to say, but those are pretty remarkable numbers, all the same.
I know Van Gogh was a genius. If the point of this were “Van Gogh was a mad genius,” I would not be sharing this with you.
But I found this and I thought, “Oh, what a vaguely interesting thing.” And then I got to the part about the Hubble Space Telescope, and, let me tell you: Mind. Blown.
We’ve got the set up here, but you have to watch the video for the full effect. It’s all the way at the bottom.
Get this: Van Gogh was a pretty cool artist (duh), but as it turns out…
…he was also A SCIENTIST!*
*Pretty much.
Here’s the story.
While Van Gogh was in an asylum in France, after he mutilated his ear during a psychotic episode*…
(*Or, and I’d like to thank the entire Internet for pointing this out, there’s a theory that his friend Paul Gauguin actually cut off his ear, in a drunken sword fight, in the dark. The more you know!)
…he was able to capture one of science’s most elusive concepts:
~~~TURBULENCE~~~
Although it’s hard to understand with math (like, REALLY HARD), it turns out that art makes it easy to depict how it LOOKS.
So what is turbulence?
Turbulence, or turbulent flow, is a concept of fluid dynamics where fluid movements are “self-similar” when there’s an energy cascade — so basically, big eddies make smaller eddies, and those make even smaller ones … and so on and so forth.
It looks like this:
See? It’s easier to look at pictures to understand it.
Thing is, scientists are pretty much *just* starting to figure this stuff out.
Then you’ve got Van Gogh, 100 years earlier, in his asylum, with a mutilated ear, who totally nailed it!
The folks who noticed Van Gogh’s ability to capture turbulence checked to see whether other artists did the same. Most impressionists achieved ” luminance” with their art (which is the sort-of *pulsing* you see when you look at their paintings that really shows what light looks like).
But did other artists depict turbulence the way Van Gogh did?
NOPE.
Not even “The Scream” could hold a candle to Van Gogh!
Even in his darkest time, Van Gogh was able to capture — eerily accurately — one of nature’s most complex and confusing concepts … 100 years before scientists had the technology to observe actual star turbulence and realize its similarity to fluid turbulence mathematics as well as Van Gogh’s swirling sky. Cool, huh?
Prior to its release, Ariana Grande’s new album Eternal Sunshine was shrouded in mystery. Outside of the project’s lead single “Yes, And?” or the teaser posts about the tracklist, Grande wanted to keep everything close to the vest. Now that the 13-track body of work has hit streaming platforms, it is up to the fans to dissect its content.
Well, we can answer a few of those inquiries. Continue below for more details.
Is Ariana Grande’s “True Story” An Actual True Story?
So, what is the Max Martin-produced record “True Story” about? Based on the lyrics, a nasty breakup.
“I’ll play the villain if you need me to / I know how this goes, yeah / I’ll be the one you pay to see play thе scene / Roll the camеras, please / Turnin’ like a dime, wastin’ all their time / Sneakin’ like a creep in the night / But I’ll play whatever part you need me to / This is a true story about all the lies,” sings Grande.
But is it actually based on an actual story (or Grande’s alleged love triangle)? According to Grande’s interview with Apple Music‘s Zane Lowe, no. “True Story” is inspired by “an untrue story based on all untrue events.”
During the conversation, Grande went on to expand on that statement.
“You can pull from your truth,” she said. “You can pull from a concept, you can pull from a film, from a story you’re telling. From a story about a relationship that a friend told you. Art is really, it can come from anywhere.”
So much for that conspiracy theory. Watch the full interview below.
Eternal Sunshine is out now via Republic. Find more information here.
Flow Festival Helsinki is bringing a pretty cool lineup to Finland this summer (from August 9 to 11), featuring Fred Again.., The Smile, Jessie Ware, Idles, Alvvays, Pulp, Denzel Curry, Raye, Blonde Redhead, and PJ Harvey. Now, the roster has gotten even better.
The electronic music experts over at Resident Advisor recently announced they’re hosting the festival’s Front Yard stage this year, for the sixth time. Across the festival’s three days, RA will host performances by Young Marco, Helena Hauff, Héctor Oaks, LSDXOXO, Job Jobse, Animistic Beliefs, DJ Fart In The Club, DJ Gigola, DJ Spit, Pablo Bozzi, Paula Koski, Denzel & Joni DJ, MORA, Marju, Karoliina Pärnänen, Mr Velcro Fastener, emkay, Malin Nyqvist, Laura MRLS, DJ JVS, Jeku, Mary Young, and ATI.
Tickets for the 18+ event (the whole fest, not just RA’s part) are available now via the Flow Festival website. Three-day passes start at 239€ (about $261), while a two-day pass goes for 199€ ($218) and a one-day pass is 129€ ($141) for Friday or Sunday, or 149€ ($163) for Saturday.
Flow Festival, meanwhile, was among the nominees for Best Festival Creative at the 2024 Uproxx Sound + Vision Awards. Sound + Vision is “a first-of-its-kind award honoring the creative direction that helps music connect with its audience, adding untold value and nuance to the art form.” The awards were chosen by “a panel of creative directors, photographers, designers, and industry professionals, representing projects whose impact was felt in 2023.”
In a profession where a story can live (or die) with a stare, a glance, or a knowing gaze, Cillian Murphy has a natural resource most actors would kill for. His are the kind of icy blues that hold an audience hostage, the ones Billie Eilish writes songs about. They can terrify, unsettle, mesmerize, and madden at whim – and throughout his nearly 30-year career, the Irish export has deftly wielded them to captivate fans of both TV and film. It’s strange that only now, after years of commanding performances that made him a regular hire with directors like Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan, Murphy is finally receiving his flowers. His talent has always been there, easily observed or, more often than not, impossible to miss, but the purist approach he takes to role choosing means he’s eschewed the expected route of big-budget blockbuster, star-studded limited series, and superhero team-up exclusivity that so many of his peers have tread. It’s why, for every Oppenheimer and Dunkirk you’ll find an Irish-made indie crime comedy or cult-favorite thriller on his IMDb page.
Murphy can be counted on to be the best part of anything he’s in, but he’s rarely been promoted to leading man status. As we embrace the Cillian Murphy Appreciation Era and welcome others to the party, let’s take a look back at his impressive filmography – some performances we loved, and some that flew under the radar for far too long.
Renaissance
15. Disco Pigs (2001)
As Phoebe Waller-Bridge might say, “This is a love story.” A very fucked up, bloody love story. Born on the same day, in the same hospital, and living as next-door neighbors, Pig (Murphy) and Runt (Elaine Cassidy) bring out the very worst in each other. Reckless, isolated, and often times sociopathic — the pair tear through their small Irish town as their platonic bond evolves into something more sexual, and much darker than anticipated. This marks the debut of Murphy, who stumbled into the audition and impressed playwright Enda Walsh with his raw talent and unfiltered self-confidence. As Pig, Murphy is a heaving, shouting battering ram fueled by angst, obsession, and uncontrollable rage. You’ll have a hard time turning away.
Buena Vista
14. Intermission (2003)
Another Irish experiment, this time shot in a documentary style that flips through multiple points of view, Intermission is a black crime comedy filled with recognizable statesmen. Everyone from Colm Meaney to Colin Farrell chews up scenery in this tale of a bank robbery gone wrong, a bleakly funny bus accident, and a break-up that pushes a man to the brink. Murphy is that man, a tortured, bumbling romantic hero trying to win back his girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald) by the dumbest means necessary. Later in his career, Murphy would choose to play more refined, stoic men with conflicts more internal in nature, so it’s a joy to watch him flail and flounder his way to a happy ending here.
Icon Film
13. Anthropoid (2016)
This tense spy thriller recounts the real World War II mission that tasked Czech soldiers with assassinating SS General Reinhard Heydrich — the mastermind behind the Nazi’s Final Solution. Along with Jamie Dornan, Murphy plays one of the agents of chaos, a reserved and focused comrade hell-bent on contributing to the war effort, even at the cost of his life and others. The film suffers from pacing issues, and Dornan’s character isn’t given much to do, but Murphy commands the screen as Jozef, a seemingly unfeeling cog in the machine whose steel facade begins to crack when his mission goes awry.
Focus Features
12. Free Fire (2016)
A miscommunication and a melee of bullets thrust audiences straight into the action of this genre thriller starring Murphy, Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, and Jack Reynor. After an arms deal gone wrong and a double-cross done badly, Murphy’s IRA boss Chris finds himself in a ridiculously chaotic shootout where no one can truly win. Everyone earns some laughs thanks to a darkly comedic script and fast-paced dialogue but Murphy somehow manages to infuse some backbone into what could’ve been a paint-by-numbers last-man-standing type.
Picturehouse
11. The Party (2017)
A social satire with sharp teeth, this British comedy traps a group of friends for a celebration that soon spirals out of control. Everyone’s hiding a secret and, before the canapes burn, shots will be fired. While Patricia Clarkson undeniably gets the best lines, it’s Murphy’s turn as a scorned lover / coke-sniffing investment banker that keeps things teetering on the high-wire between comedy and dread. The claustrophobic nature of the film’s setting makes Tom’s erratic physicality even more threatening and it’s his anarchic energy that serves as the catalyst for this dinner party disaster.
Warner Bros.
10. Dunkirk (2017)
Proving that no part is too small should Christopher Nolan come calling, Murphy’s turn as the “Shivering Soldier” in this historical drama chronicling the rescue mission of 330,000 allied soldiers from the beaches of France in 1940 is memorable, impressively so. Shell-shocked and sporting a one-thousand-yard star, Murphy’s lone survivor is all desperation, driven by the instinctual need to escape the horrors he knows await. In a film oversaturated with huge battle sequences and nail-biting stakes, the visceral emotions the actor conveys give the film the reality-grounding moments it needs.
Paramount
9. A Quiet Place II (2020)
John Krasinski recruits Murphy for this sequel to his surprise horror hit, following Emily Blunt’s Evelyn and the rest of the Abbott family venture into the unknown following a terrible tragedy. Murphy’s Emmett is a hardened, reclusive survivor — and old friend of Evelyn’s husband — who reluctantly shelters them before accepting a rescue mission that has life-changing consequences for them all. Grimy and grizzled, Murphy’s almost unrecognizable under mountains of facial hair and a trucker cap. His lone wolf anti-hero is nihilistic, understandably so, but it’s the way Murphy plays his relationship with Regan (Millicent Simmons) that reminds us of this man’s suffering, and his ability to still see good in the world.
Warner Bros
8. Batman Begins (2005)
Thank the comic book gods that Murphy didn’t nab the initial role he auditioned for in Nolan’s inspired superhero reboot because a cowl and cape would’ve only limited this destined villain. Instead, Nolan saw a madness glittering in Murphy’s glacial orbs, casting him as the gleefully deranged Dr. Jonathan Crane — a surprisingly worthy adversary to Christian Bale’s Dark Knight. A haystack of hair, a thinly-wired pair of spectacles, and a truly unhinged phonetic reading of the word “Batman” marks Murphy as one of the best baddies to ever do it in DC film lore.
Warner Bros. Pictures
7. Inception (2010)
The spoiled son of a dying billionaire, Murphy’s Robert Fischer is the mark, not the mastermind behind Nolan’s dream-within-a-dream sci-fi caper. No, that honor goes to Leonardo DiCaprio whose visionary architect leads a team of dream thieves on the biggest heist of their careers. As Fischer, Murphy could’ve easily leaned too far into the unlikable, giving us an aloof nepo baby we could easily root against. Instead, his heartbreaking realization that his estranged father held genuine love for him is the movie’s biggest payoff solely because Murphy sells the emotional epiphany as if his life depended on it.
Fox Searchlight
6. Sunshine (2007)
Danny Boyle’s ode to the sci-fi classics that came before manifests as this deep space disaster starring everyone from Michelle Yeoh to Chris Evans and Rose Byrne. Along with Murphy, they play an international group of astronauts on a mission to save a dying star before the Earth freezes over. Unlike the rest of his team, Murphy’s uber-cerebral outsider is in on the secret — there’s no way home for anyone on this ship. It’s a more subdued turn from Murphy — though Boyle makes heavy use of how those endless arctic depths look against the sterile, sparse backdrop of a clunky spaceship.
DreamWorks
5. Red Eye (2005)
Just 20 minutes into Wes Craven’s high-flying thriller you’ll come to realize you’re watching the wrong movie. What begins as a rom-com, complete with a meet-cute that feels designed by fate, quickly morphs into an agonizing hostage situation in which Murphy terrorizes poor Rachel McAdams within an inch of her sanity. Equal parts charm and menace, Murphy’s Jackson Rippner (subtle this film is not) has murderous designs that hinge on the help of McAdams’ hotel manager, Lisa. The two try to outsmart each other at every turn in a heart-pumping cat-and-mouse game filled with just enough chemistry to cause you to question whether you can have Stockholm Syndrome for a fictional character.
Pathe
4. The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006)
A heartbreaking war drama centered on two brothers fighting for their country, albeit in different ways, this Ken Loach-directed period piece sports an emotionally charged performance from Murphy. As Damien, a promising young doctor eager to escape the troubles in Ireland, Murphy begins the film as a passive observer, then reluctant participant in these homegrown atrocities done in the name of freedom. Soon though, as friends dies and his brother is tortured, he’s radicalized to the call — even as it costs him everything. Murphy delivers a full-spectrum transformation here, playing Damien as a sympathetic, stubborn convert who you can’t help but root for.
DNA Films
3. 28 Days Later (2002)
Murphy makes one hell of a first impression in Danny Boyle’s horror franchise starter, which marks the first time a mainstream audience witnessed his talent on the big screen. As Jim, a bicycle courier who wakes up from a coma to a deserted, ravaged London infected by a virus that turns humans into mindless rage machines, Murphy is our entry point. It’s a tough job — to be both main character and plot-dumping lens — but he pulls it off, morphing from a terror-stricken young man to a by-any-means-necessary survivor with blood on his hands.
Netflix
2. Peaky Blinders (2013)
Speaking of red hands, the theme song and slo-mo walks aren’t the only things that set this Steven Knight-created gangster drama apart from the rest of the prestige streaming crowd. As Tommy Shelby, a war vet suffering from PTSD who harbors insatiable ambitions and bears the weight of his family’s survival on his shoulders, Murphy mesmerizes. He’s all trimmed vests, Brummie twang, and shark-like eyes with ruthless business acumen and a tongue sharper than the razors stored in his cap. His evolution from a small-time criminal to corrupt politician is a whirlwind of double-crosses, backroom dealings, murder plots, and meticulous planning — and Murphy drives it all with a simmering rage just waiting to be triggered.
Universal
1. Oppenheimer (2023)
Surviving on a girl dinner of cigarettes and dirty martinis with haunted eyes and cheekbones so defined they’re basically a walking advert for buccal fat removal, Murphy shrinks in on himself to play the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Playing various versions of the tortured genius through time — a suicidal student, a celebrated physics professor, and the author of a world-destroying weapon — Murphy taps into the man’s mania, obsession, and self-inflated ego as he crafts a death-dealing invention with the help of his fellow scientists. But, it’s his turn as an older, more jaded, regret-riddled man reflecting on his legacy and the ethics of what he’s done that prove Murphy is practically peerless on screen.
The first reviews for Love Lies Bleeding are piling in, and the critics agree that Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian have chemistry for days. Directed by Rose Glass, this erotic noir thriller follows a gym manager (Stewart) who follows in love with a body-builder (Stewart) as the two embark on a “genuinely hot” romance that leaves a trail of bodies in their wake.
As you can tell by the excerpts below, Love Lies Bleeding has critics transfixed by the two leads and the film’s all-consuming vibes that will apparently “torment” you in all the right ways:
There are movies that grab you by the throat. There are movies that punch you in the gut. Love Lies Bleeding is both, and I f*cking love it. From the mind of Rose Glass, writer/director of the 2020 stunner Saint Maud, comes a queer romance that’s as packed with thrills as it is with raw sensuality and dazzling star power. Come for Kristen Stewart sporting a DIY mullet and a dirty mouth. Come for Katy O’Brian (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s scene-stealing warrior princess Jentorra) flexing not only her muscles but her range as a beguiling bodybuilder with a perm as big as her dreams. Come for Ed Harris and Dave Franco in roles both comedic and nerve-rattling. But come.
At first, “Love Lies Bleeding” feels like a relatively straightforward noir with the outsider in Jackie almost stumbling into decisions that can’t be reversed. It’s been compared to “Drive” and “Thelma & Louise,” but there’s also a bit of the great “Red Rock West” and other films about strangers who get stuck in the small town they just wanted to spend a night in. When a shocking and gory act of violence forever alters Jackie & Lou’s relationship, “Love Lies Bleeding” really picks up steam, pushing its characters into increasingly tight spaces from which violence may provide the only escape.
It’s the pair’s crackling chemistry — which Glass funnels into a series of genuinely hot sex scenes that more than prove the necessity for such sequences in films that hinge on actual human romantic relationships — that drives “Love Lies Bleeding,” an alternately alluring and excruciating crime thriller that also smacks of body horror and midnight movie thrills. Glass, who previously earned scads of instant fans with her “Saint Maud,” again tackles the human body as a vessel for pain, pleasure, and so much more.
The ultimate, simple thesis of Love Lies Bleeding is embedded within its form from the very beginning. At the onset of the film, you are plunged into a world of all-encompassing sound. The horrific squelch of a blocked toilet, the slurp of a milkshake into a mouth guarded by browned nubs, the crack and squish of teeth biting into the hard shell of a beetle; the fantastical crunch of veins bulging beneath skin after a shot of steroids, the crack of a head against a glass table until it breaks open like an egg. The tactile world Glass has crafted is just as immersive and erotic in its design as it is physically between her two lead lovers.
“Love Lies Bleeding” turns wild and garish, and you may think the film is losing control, yet Rose Glass is fiercely in control of what she’s doing. She’s made a midnight noir that shoots over the top of our expectations but lands where it should, at a place where even valorous people have to go to extremes.
“Love Lies Bleeding” has superb technical style. We can hear the muscles rippling under Jackie’s skin, and the ominous difference between quiet and airless. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman shoots the movie like a prestige noir. At night, the desert blacks are as dense and mysterious as the La Brea Tar Pits. But Glass herds the tone toward comedy, teasing us to admit that Lou and Jackie’s predicament is funny. … Then again, “Love Lies Bleeding” isn’t really about love. It might not be about anything besides Glass’ own urge to poke and prod audiences to remember the kinky delight of movies that leave us dangling. The torment is delicious.
Being a Jack Black costar seems like a fun time. The cast of the Super Mario Bros. Movie got to find that out firsthand as they got to perform an acapella version of the game’s iconic theme song and watch the hilarious Bowser actor turn his character’s brokenhearted ballad (“Peaches“) into a bonafide cultural phenomenon.
Now, it’s the Kung-Fu Panda 4 cast’s turn to goof off with the king of goofing off. As it turns out, the Tenacious D cover of Britney Spears’ debut hit “…Baby One More Time” Black shared a few weeks ago was for the film. Now, there’s a music video to go along with it and a bunch of the cast — Awkwafina, Dustin Hoffman, James Hong, and Ke Huy Quan included — teamed up with Black and his bandmate Kyle Gass to wreak havoc on Hollywood’s historic TCL Chinese Theater while performing and dancing to the song. Unfortunately, despite Black’s plea to work with Spears directly, she doesn’t show up in the video. I’m sure she appreciates the love, though.
Kung-Fu Panda 4 is in theaters now and garnering solid reviews (its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is currently a couple of points higher than the third one’s). You can watch Jack Black and co. cover Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” above.
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