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**Pinky** · 09-03-2020, 06:22 PM

Originally published here.

back to my Tom watch

Filtered phone shot from my TV
DVD set of The Flash season 6 arrived
This is Nash Wells

I love seeing how many times I can cartoon and posterize screenshots before they disintegrate into garbled data. Tom generally holds up a bit better than some others, not sure exactly why, possibly face definition and really good hi def lighting to begin with.

So anyone new to me, I've got this years long The Flash hashtag thread on twitter, and since covid took over, I have become so bored that I've started a rare #watchalltheTomCavanaghthings to see how many movies and TV series he shaves and/or brushes his teeth in. I normally don't do this with actors, ever. I'm not particularly into actor following, more of a very picky scifi enthusiast with side jaunts into whatever. Saying that, however, I own nearly everything Jacky Chan has ever made, and I did at one point own just about everything Johnny Depp was ever in, as well, plus I have a life sized Jack Sparrow cardboard cutout in my house.

Speaking of that, wonder if a person can custom order a life sized Harrison Wells wall cling from Fathead... Or like a life sized cardboard cutout from Standees. I could try ordering something but I don't wanna throw money away right now after buying up stacks of hard to find DVD collections. You guys know you can custom order just about anything, right. So many sites out there provide really cool services like that. I've seen people do that with wallpaper, wrapping paper, toilet paper, socks, spandex, clocks, cakes, and I'm sure someone out there has done an entire Christmas tree in Harrison Wells. I find some really wild stuff when I get bored.

Here, click this and get lost in tumblr. That's right, I bring goodies to my review writeups.

Anyway, back to the Tom watch. I'm a bad person and never noticed Tom Cavanagh before The Flash (I do remember roundly avoiding Ed with a big thumbs down back in the day because I'm such a stick in the mud for scifi and explosions), but it's hard not to notice a guy brushing his teeth and spitting in someone's coffee. The scene starts about 45 seconds in.

And then when I finally did stick a toe into unknown Tom Cavanagh waters, I started with The Bird Men and dang if he wasn't shaving and brushing his teeth. Then I wound up watching Love and Debt next, boom, shaving and brushing teeth. By then I was hooked. How many movies and TV shows has Tom Cavanagh shaved and/or brushed his teeth in? Is this a standard that comes with a Tom contract? Fans wanna know. After Breakfast with Scot he was four and oh, and I was seriously tripping. Who winds up shaving or brushing their teeth in everything they do? Well, I'm finding out that not every project required a hygiene scene. Something More was it's own brand of fun when Tom's character Harry caught his wife cheating on him, and 400 Days was so creepy that I seriously worry about having Tom Cavanagh nightmares now. Creepy Tom freaked me out. Guess that means he's a really good actor.

So after all that, while I was waiting on my season 6 The Flash to arrive from a pre-order that hadn't been filled yet, I found the Ed series real cheap. Here, lemme paste over the Ed stuff I have written so far.

I can usually find anything, and Ed is one of them. There's always someone somewhere in the world recording constantly, and they do really nice jobs of boxsetting entire collections, sometimes even print the series artwork onto the discs. I'm not sure that's legal, so I won't link where I found it ($26 instead of the usual $80+) (oh here you go, $35), but I'm on a quest to find out how many TV series and movies Tom Cavanagh shaves and/or brushes his teeth in. I was at 100% until I watched 400 Days last week (found that one for $4, guys). That was hella creepy, nightmares of Tom Cavanagh are real now. I've been putting off Sublime for a day I feel more capable of handling it. I'm not the Ed type (IMDb) because it's seriously lacking scifi formula, but I have been known to jaunt off into more mundane directions for odd reasons. This is one of them.

Here's the Ed pilot if you guys are bored and need distraction walking away from the news mess setting all our tension off. You're welcome.

Ok, back to today. At this point I've made it 7 eps into season one and although there's been no shaving or brushing teeth, I'm deeply questioning how Ed and Carol created a 50 pound meatloaf together for a Thanksgiving at the bowling alley for only like 10 or so people and how

we didn't see any of bonding/not bonding over actually cooking that much food together because it's only logical that the most time they ever spent together doing something real was completely skipped over for a show focused on Ed trying to get Carol's affections
no one at the table questioned 5 pounds of meat per person
wtf where the heck did they even get an oven to cook that huge of a meatloaf in a bowling alley (I'm asking as a professional with long resume list across food and service industries)
I gotta keep watching this series because it's sheer gold for story bloopers and plot holes
I'm also psyche analyzing Carol and wondering what Ed is getting himself into because she is wack for dating her teacher what appears to be nearly straight outa high school for this long without committed ties or thoughts of children and 7 years before she starts even thinking she needs to get her own life smh
Ed really needs to slow down and think about this...

Yes, I got sucked in. See, this is why I avoid regular TV without explosions and spaceships. You get sucked into the weird psychology of TV writing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
I just realized SyfyDesigns doesn't have an area for regular TV because all of us over there are into scifi and explosions.... You know what, I'm just going to start a Tom Watch thread in there anyway, dang it. Tom Cavanagh is frickin Pariah now, so there you go.
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now click this and go get lost on Pinterest. Start a new board. Build a house around it. Make it your life, have kids, raise them on Pinterest life memes, strike gold when you find that rare elusive recipe for purple macaroni salad. You know you want to...

Wait, that just clicks to one pic
Go to a whole board ---> CLICK

I spent about a week thinking through a Tom watch review, what with L.A. burning last year and Hollywood grinding to a halt this year, and while I realize not all filming is in Hollywood by a long shot, the entertainment industry itself is taking a real beating this year with the covid thing, and sadly, Hollywood isn't looking too cozy this year. Add in the crazy twitter fights with a few key entertainers diving headfirst into political hate fests, and I very nearly completely stopped reviewing.

I'm the kind of person who vets anyone I drag into my weird little spotlight, so I did my civic duty and plunged into fanstalking Tom as a public entity. The last thing I want this year is to wind up caught in a sidetaking manifesto showdown, so I'm sliding back in with as little political affiliation as I can around a very well known and seasoned actor who has extremely clean credentials (compared to many). So there's Tom-

Still married, four kids, which you can find easily in search, like this page.
Had malaria as a child and now does fundraisers for Nothing But Nets. Quote from Variety article.

How did you get involved in the non-profit Nothing but Nets?
I spent time in my childhood in Africa and had malaria as a child. My sister had a serious case of malaria in Africa. And then Rick Reilly wrote a column on the back page of Sports Illustrated. It was a simple plea talking about, “If we all gathered a buck, or two, or $10, we could buy one net, and then we could help this village in Africa.” The outpouring of money and support was, A, surprising, and B, led to the formation of this group called Nothing but Nets where the mandate was “let’s put a dent into the disease that is malaria.” Our pipeline is very simple. Ten dollars here buys one net and that net gets handed to a family, and you can track it. Nothing but Nets paired with the UN, and the thing just grew and grew. I went to Uganda. We went to refugee camps. Malaria was killing their children, and it’s incredible that you can drop a mortality rate by 80% by simply handing out nets. Our goal is to get rid of malaria. It’s a worthy cause, direct and simple.
You organized the Cavanagh Classic basketball tournament as part of that.
Yeah. The Cavanagh Classic is an obnoxiously-named charity basketball game that is furthering the cause of Nothing but Nets. So I badger some of my fancy, famous friends. I still play basketball in a couple leagues in New York City. So I say, ‘Hey, come do some good.’ We do it at the Rucker, which is one of the best-known city playgrounds. It’s in New York City. It’s a lovely event. I think the worst job at that event is the person who dresses up in the mascot uniform, which is this giant furry mosquito, and we try and hold it in the summer, and that person has to lose about 20 pounds in sweat by stuffing themselves into a mosquito costume and dancing around for the Nothing but Nets Cavanagh Classic.

I've dug through nearly 50 reviews, interviews, and podcasts and have yet to find or hear anything coming from Tom Cavanagh that I have to politely ignore in order to enjoy seeing him on TV. Sometimes it's difficult to ignore an entertainer's personal tastes and opinions if they manage to filter through the fiction or documentary lenses through which we originally find them. Despite rigorous deep dives, I cannot find a single thing that 'turns me off' as a viewer about this man. That is a rarity in entertainment.
Personal note- I have prosopagnosia and I can't remember Tom's face when I'm not looking directly at the TV, which rules out that I'm following an actor around because of his looks. Quoting from an earlier blog post-

Despite all the vids I've shared and movies and shows I've seen lately, I cannot see Tom Cavanagh's face in my head unless I'm looking directly at him. The prosopagnosia is strong with that one. Joe Flannigan, no problem. I mean, I can at least get a forehead and eyes on him and I'm not even into Joe Flannigan. But yeah, I'm having as much trouble memorizing Tom's face as I had Scott's face and never admitted it for years. Imagine being married for 15 years before you even confess you can't picture your husband's face when you close your eyes and you're sitting right by him.

There are millions of memes and gifs of this guy on every platform and not a single one of them ever hit my radar in general as a tv viewer/reviewer until I started looking him up, so I didn't follow this one from a trail on social medias to the film work, like I did the Benedict version of Sherlock.

Tom Cavanagh Fans tossed this (originl) out on twitter and facebook roughly four hours after my own Star Labs t-shirt went live on my own blog here and on pinterest, and all I'm saying is coincidence haunts me and I feel like Tom is judging looking right at me and I wanna know what that pendant is.

Yeah, I'm not big into making my own memes. I think the only memes I made that ever went a little crazy were for the Oak Island guys (not even going to say his name here, that run on Pinky blog is still going on and is pure facepalm).

Tom is fun to mess around with in my phone.

Remember that time I took Robin Lord Taylor through 13 filters? I just put Tom through 15. The glasses are fake. I cartooned immediately and then posterized this at least 3 times in between the other filters. Here is the original if you're curious. The game is to take it through as many filters as you can without losing integrity. It's like a phone sport when you're super bored.

I'm not going to list everything I've ever found and read or listened to involving Tom, but that's my opinions in a nutshell. Cool guy, very busy, goodhearted, extremely professional, and loads of fun.

I think the rest of everything Tom I've ever written is covered in my The Flash thread on SyfyDesigns.

So this is a start of what looks like might be a very challenging project. How many movies and TV shows has Tom Cavanagh shaved and/or brushed his teeth in? Guess we'll find out.

**Pinky** · 09-18-2020, 10:12 AM

Originally published at https://pinkfeldspar.blogspot.com/20...om-part-1.html

Creepy Tom, Part 1

All righty, guys, back on my Tom Watch where we find out how many movies and TV shows Tom Cavanagh has shaved and/or brushed his teeth in. Since we're coming up on Halloween season, I thought why not brace myself for creepy Tom, right. He's obviously not into hygiene in 400 Days, but that doesn't mean we can't take a look at what's going on. Tom Watch updates will be posted on SyfyDesigns.com at Tom Cavanagh- My Tom Watch Challenge.

All my screenshots were taken with my phone while I was watching TV, so you're getting it pretty raw between the tech flaws. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use." Personal Disclaimer- This is an UNmonetized personal blog. I make no money here, and I have nothing to do with potential Tom Cavanagh projects. I am not staff to anyone, nor an employer. I do not represent anyone who has ever been involved in Tom Cavanagh's career or merchandise associated with Tom Cavanagh. I am not currently selling merchandise or receiving compensation for link swapping and sharing. In future any internet sales I do will be handled through my official facebook page, dotcom, and specified twitter accounts. All my other blogs are personal and not for profit. I will never ask for or accept donations for anything I do online. If you find a site asking for money in my name, that is NOT me.

Ok, where were we?

Creepy Tom Part 1 finds us psychologically disturbed in the weirdest mystery thriller I've seen in awhile, and it's really too bad this one isn't available for free youtube viewing for the movie gang because the chat would be awesome. I'm not going to do a real recap and actually spoil it, but there might be a few giveaways you'd regret, so close your eyes when you see words and just open them for the screenshots if you are super anti-spoilers.

The main cast is a little grumpy by the time we see them here on the 398th day. We've already gone through major wtf and discovered that this experiment might not have been an experiment after all, and we're still way up in the air whether we are even still on planet. If you're a trivia buff, click.

Main cast-
Caity Lotz as Emily
Dane Cook as Dvorak
Brandon Routh as Theo
Ben Feldman as Bug

If you're an Arrowverse fan, it's fun watching Caity and Brandon 'out of character'. I was glued to every scene just because I was so familiar with them already. Part of the mystery was what the crap was up with their pasts and how that kept affecting them. The experiment was about locking a space crew into a mock ship together for 400 days to see how well they'd survive tough situations and difficult choices together. For awhile I wasn't too bothered because it was all so typical cheap bad thriller, but by the time they made it out to this table (yes, outside the ship), I was wracking my brain what could possibly really be going on, because the writing and especially acting was good enough to keep me anxiously riveted waiting for other shoes to drop any second.

Other creepy people were around, as well. They didn't seem fake or controlled or zombied, but they certainly weren't forthcoming, either. In fact, they lent a dangerous atmosphere to an otherwise empty feeling unsolvable situation. Do they have answers???

Dominic Bogart as Sketch

The set detail was intriguing enough that I couldn't get bored through scenes like these. Seriously, I couldn't decide whether part of the earth had literally been scooped up or walled in or what, but the moon dust checked out as real and the atmosphere was so thin that oxygen deprivation was a challenge.

I'm skipping lots of stuff. Let's get to creepy Tom. In true thriller fashion, we get the re-intro where we absolutely know THIS is not a nice guy. His name is Zell and he runs a diner in that weird possibly off-world ghost town with other creepy people in it who may or may not be who we thought they were, and our first question is what could they possibly be serving in a ghost town diner??? Are they role playing to add to the experiment? We're in day 399 here.

Forgive the phone shots, but since I'm not a webmaster for a fansite on this one, you get quickies. Dunno if you guys have seen Tom jogging, but I call this jogger hair, which adds major creep factor when you start wondering if he got the hair ties off someone he killed. He's got one around his left wrist, too. We don't know who he was before this big bad mystery happened, but we definitely know he's not the diner owner like he plays out because Bug found a menu with a picture of the real owners on it.

Tom has serious dead eye. I do not want to meet this guy anywhere.

Add a creepy smile...

Happy Halloween! But wait, there's more!

I'll be honest, since we moved the TV across the house, I limited my screenshot time because we have sunlight windows and this movie is hell on reflecting. I'm going to add to this hopefully over the weekend. Nothing like creeping slowly through a creepy Tom watch, but real life. Yes, I'm not done with the movie yet at all. If you can't wait, just search for 400 Days in the shopping section, I can see a used one for $1.45, other prices that include free shipping from eBay and VUDU, Walmart has it for ten bucks. You know what to do. Laterz.

**Pinky** · 09-19-2020, 09:58 AM

Originally published at https://pinkfeldspar.blogspot.com/20...-400-days.html

Creepy Tom, Part 2 (400 Days)

Had a quick 5 minutes this morning before sunrise and making weekend breakfast, so here we go with another slow creep through Creepy Tom. Quick catch up. At this point we're getting visual clues how the people in the possibly displaced ghost town are surviving as Theo is lurking around in the diner kitchen.

There you go, this kind of nails what's really going on. But remember, at this point we still don't know if this is part of the role play for the 400 days of experimental psychological stress survival. This could all be a set up.

Right after that scene, Theo turned a corner and accidentally ran into a cook with a knife and she was so shocked that it slid right into him that she gasped how sorry she was and fled. So- still part of the role play and they're supposed to just stay in character? It apparently wasn't a fatal wound.

The tension ramps up as we get confirmation that Zell does appear to be the ringleader of the surviving town folk. Remember, Zell didn't originally own the diner, but pretends to now with a woman he calls his wife who says she's not his wife. He's obviously the meanest one in town to be this controlling in a really bad survival situation.

And we get what looks like up close confirmation about how weird this situation is, a seeming ghost town somehow scooped up onto the moon or walled off and made to look like it's on the moon or whatever. Psychologically upsetting enough and then you add in the danger of possibly being hunted as food.

Crapola, Zell has found their 'ship' entrance. Remember, the experiment is underground in a bunker made to mimic being inside a spaceship.

Crappy zoom, lol. Sorry about all the blue, but phones do that unless you really get into the camera settings. I'm lazy. He's not really blue on the DVD.

Inside the 'ship', the hunt begins in earnest. By the way, this is the first we see Zell in this bomber jacket, in all the previous scenes before the hunt started, he's in a muscle shirt. We have earlier indications that it's chilly 'outside', but in the diner I'm guessing the kitchen stoves kept the building a little warmer. They're pretty consistent with their believable effects in this movie. The bomber looks a little big on Zell (Tom is 6 feet tall), so whoever it belonged to was conceivably allegedly (by insinuation as we continue viewing) dragged down by the hunt club Zell started. Visual cues like this lend loads to quality filming.

Like a bloodhound, methodical, quiet, patient.

Maybe a little malnourished, and we already suspect slight oxygen deprivation. Probably very hungry and bored enough from months of stale living to completely immerse and invest himself into this hunt. If this is still role play for the 400 day experiment, it's really good role play since the targets aren't even in sight.

And he's enjoying this a bit.

If you feel intrigued by filming but never took classes and don't have the time for online researching other people's film studies, you can play with this on your own tech while you watch TV. When I started my own film study blog years ago (original site started 2005), I started with a crap phone and a crap TV. Tech is so much better nowadays, phones and TVs are now higher quality at cheaper prices that we ever had in the past, making this really easy. Everything being digital means you can take 100 screenshots and see them instantly and then delete them out of your way just as quickly.

Also on your phone, most of you will have editing options. If a scene is being ornery, you can do upright or portrait shots, then trim out any excess. Sometimes films are atrociously obnoxious for tech-to-tech screenshotting between the fast cutaway scenes, the weird TV glow, the even weirder wavy light lines that we don't see with our eyes during regular TV watching, and however cantankerous your phone settings might be. I used to really fight with it, now I'm just meh. If you want a perfect screenshot, you need DVD player software in an HD laptop and then screencap controls on the side. I used to do that, it was wonderful, and then W10 decided I need to pay for DVD software to access the built in DVD player and I was like you turds...- NO. I refuse. So I'm slinging out crap phone shots. I have the money, I'm just stubborn that way. Rebellious. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

Film studies can include set design, makeup and costuming, actor spotting, storyboarding, and any number of specific interest focus items, whatever you feel drawn to. The easiest way to do film studies at home is to simply watch a film and point your phone at the TV and take pictures. You can use the pause button to freeze and advance frame by frame for fast cutaway scenes, which are often so fast that your mind sees faster than your eyes and you only saw something for a split second. It's amazing what the brain can pick up while we watch TV. Having used frame advance across hundreds of films over nearly two decades, I've been amazed how cleverly stories can meld into our minds with the most fleeting insinuations in backgrounds, the tiniest clues on costuming. We are all brain trained to pick things up so quickly now that we become bored with 'slow' films sharing very little actual interpretive information. We are media encultured to respond to visual cues we don't even know we see.

Yes, I wrestled my tech over this one.

Having said that, I don't believe there is anything sinister behind 400 Days as a film entity. I'm not a film conspiracy theorist, for the most part. I just point out what I find in my own film studies.

Since we are doing a Creepy Tom watch, we're focusing on the character Zell almost exclusively in this writeup, so if you want to know more about this particular movie, search for 400 Days online and find reviews. I'm not here to do a recap or review of the whole movie right now. I'm also not here to grade Tom's work, simply to enjoy it. If you guys want to use these screencaps for anything, I'm fine with it, I don't care whether you source or link back or not because it's not really my material. I just snapped pix of my TV on my phone. See the disclaimer in my previous post for fair use in film studies.

Sorry that's all I got today, kind of doing things on the run when I get the chance. I'll hopefully get this done over the next couple days.

**Pinky** · 10-17-2020, 08:05 PM

Creepy Tom, part 3 (400 days)

originally published September 27, 2020

Reminder that I'm getting screenshots of my TV with my phone,
which can see tech my eyes can't. So, weird glow stripes.

Apologies for taking a week off from this, distractions abound. This will conclude 400 days and how to do your own film study at home if you're stuck on a second covid lockdown, after this I'll get back to high speed splat reviewing while we search out all the TV shows and movies that Tom Cavanagh has shaved or brushed his teeth in. I may have to keep a list updated at the top of this thread as I add to this, like Movie Title, shaved ___ (yes, no), brushed teeth ___(yes, no) so we can keep track of what's been checked.

I'm going to immediately bah humbug the most prominent user review on IMDb with an inability to fall into the screen. That person obviously doesn't know how to enjoy doing a film study. I've watched 400 Days several times now and have enjoyed every bit of it. I come from the olden days of Bruce Campbell and the Raimi brothers building their horror empire from scratch, so I know how to enjoy the construction that goes into this kind of film.Ã The whole point is to frustrate the viewer. Because it's fun. If you come away satisfied instead of reeling wtf, THAT is how you measure this kind of film being a flop. The psychological experimentation extends out into the audience, you nit.

Ok, where were we. Oh, yeah. A couple of our crew have been followed by a disturbing group of what appear to be hungry cannibals in an abandoned ghost town possibly on the moon, and Theo has already been possibly accidentally stabbed by someone who may or may not have been in character during this 400 day experiment, and we didn't just see him knock one guy out with a board and chokehold another guy into unconsciousness while they were getting away. Now Emily is very conspicuously hiding under a little table on the right and this tall smelly creep walks in pretending not to see her.

And we watch him go through the whole savoring the moment thing.

Yeah, she's toast...

Nah, just kidding. I wouldn't spoil it like that, seriously. But you find out later just how badly this guy creeps her out. I mean, I was totally creeped by that and he wasn't even looking at me.

I'm going to insert a few things to keep your eyes on while you watch the movie before I sling you through some more screenshots. See how much of this you can pick up on.

The background colors have turned into the kind of weird off slant woozy green and dark blue shadow light that make you feel like this is a bad dream. Toto, we aren't in a squeaky white 'spaceship' any more.
Tom actually seems to get more face time than the core cast does through this fight, although it all goes by super fast. You notice it more when you freeze frame advance, really pick up on the creep factor. Theo looking terrified and anxious seems exquisitely justified. Zell is looney toons.
The blurring keeps you from noticing how far apart those fists really are from faces. You can't see that until you frame advance, although it's still really hard to catch.
I didn't notice until I slowed the movie down that my brain had totally filled in the blurred areas. What some people call bad filming is really very clever.
I actually jerked at the end of the fight and I'll tell you why when we get there.

I do have to say at this point SPOILERS COMING.

It's important to pick up that Theo is almost squeamishly resistant to violence, although he does pull a decent fight. His anxiety shines through brilliantly.

I'm the sort of person who will stop and look at everything on surfaces and walls.

Zell relishes what he's doing a little too much. He knows he's got all the time in the world to kill.

Nice detail. Now I want to know if he counts the people he's killed to eat. There may be no other way to gauge the passing of time.

You didn't just see me skip a major flurry of violence. Theo isn't faring well.

Told ya.

Zell loving his boots getting some action. The camera usually pans to the victim more, so I'm wondering what they're wanting us to see about Zell. The thing I keep noticing is that he takes his time, like a cat with a mouse.

And now here comes the knife.

We also keep getting angles like this. You can't quite see what's really happening, like a hidden witness... (That bad review guy totally missed the psychological point of this entire movie. Just rubbing that in.)

Because I was so immersed in this scene, I caught this look immediately. Something happened. Something's wrong.

There's our hidden witness.

This was obvious, I thought, but especially moreso when you frame advance. This reaction doesn't fit Zell's motivation. At all.

I mean AT ALL.

This is a quiet 'oh crap' moment.

And this is when you realize...

you just saw the first real death in the movie.

I stopped there even though the movie wasn't quite done yet because that was the last of Tom, rest in peace. We could speculate all day on the ending and what it all means, but I'm not here to go that far.

Ok, so Tom didn't shave or brush his teeth in this film, alas, but it's ok because we got to see a side of him we don't usually see in other projects, and that's grimy. Get this boi a bath, stat!

I've got a couple more shows in mind for lead up to Halloween. I've gotta brace myself at some point and watch Sublime, and I found an old episode of Cold Squad wherein Tom's character is being investigated for murder. Will Tom shave or brush his teeth? I'll definitely find out.

I found other reviewers doing 400 Days, here's one if you want to check it out. I disagree with his conclusion because I don't think there is any kind of intended or embedded answer.

If you'd rather have a Tom Cavanagh interview, here you go, not quite 3 months old. You're welcome.

**Pinky** · 10-17-2020, 09:18 PM

Intensely Subliminal Sublime (2007)

originally published 10-13-20

I made it to this point in the movie when I realized I got up at 5:30 a.m. to watch a guy keep falling asleep. And then I wondered if Lisa Marie Bowman (follow her) ever gets up before 6 a.m. to do a movie review.

Notes-

religious theming
medical fetish attraction
psychologically exploratory
physically triggering (viewer empathy)

Checking our viewer stash of snacks and notes. I made popcorn balls this week. *~*Awesome*~*.

Scroll at your own risk if you haven't seen this movie yet.

Disclaimer- I got phone pix of my TV while the DVD was playing. This movie is unrated and there may be a few NSFW pix in this review. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

George just woke up from a horrible nightmare.

Idyllic. Fake.

Does that mean he's fake falling?

Some of us weirdos like doing comparative eye studies. You know I'm good for this.

Me after 2 hours of sleep all night.

REMEMBER THIS LEG.

Adam and Eve motif. My first reaction to this is maybe sorta not a good idea... We all know what happened there.

Regardless of some of the medical procedure mistakes made in this movie, anyone who has felt medically compromised will likely feel gut wrenched at some point in this movie. My own tension was horrible, having way too much experience, made worse by the dvd disc being weirdly haunted to where it kept unpausing itself when I left the room, not normal in my player.

Just a reminder that I'm watching this movie to see whether Tom Cavanagh shaves and/or brushes his teeth, a quest I'm on to see how many film projects involve his oral and face hygiene because I'm a little obsessive about brushing my own teeth all my life and it's not often I run into an actor brushing their teeth on camera as much as Tom does. If I'd been at all thinkier about planning this quest out, I'd have started counting bathrooms he's been in, as well. I'm starting to wonder how many film hours he's got into bathrooms.

Anway, as such, I'm not going to heavily review the movie itself that much, but what the heck, you can have some gratuitous Tom shots. You're welcome.

Temp skipping a bunch of story, I made it up to this point where we see George looking over at a painting about the time I had started questioning whether this weird hospital experience were a sort of allegory for his real life.

Does this painting change? We get a painting showing up once in awhile, but it's not that noticeable until you ask if the painting changes. Note George's face reflected in the painting way across the room. Is he being projected into a thought world? Is he somehow projecting?

Things of note so far about George's real life-

his son is obsessed with shamanic surgeries
his daughter's girlfriend's emoglam is off the hook
his wife is obsessed with religious art and sickened by a whimsical birthday gift George got of a blood red figure stabbed by knives
his brother travels globally getting involved in dangerous charity work, which puts George on the defensive as a materialistic IT company man
his neighbor is doing very well financially because of George's advice
his lawyer has no empathetic boundaries when it comes to fear porn

George wants to know what's in the East Wing.

That face you make when you half rip your stitches just reaching for the phone.

Don't ya hate it when the nurse clams up, too? I mean, I kept thinking this guy was in George's imagination until she clammed up. (Digging deeper, is George's imaginary nurse friend clamming up? I just lost what sense of reality there was.)

I can't help feeling that Zoe is an amalgam of George's kids.

I've seen enough Tom Cavanagh now to know this is Tom's iconic face. This face tips the balance and then you plunge further into story. You know you're about to go behind the veil.

And to the East Wing they go...

Conspiracy theory heaven. All those files... Of course, George found his own file. It was gross.

Later, after blacking out, an intense argument with his medical staff, lawyer, and wife, and finding out his leg was necrotic, George had Zoe take him on another tour through the East Wing. This time we see deplorable conditions, as if he's touring third world facilities kept by nefarious medical criminals under the guise of helping the poor. We see children being separated from parents.

George locking eyes with this next one.

And we see an insinutation of children being farmed through other children.

It's hard not to jump to unknown conclusions at this point, but they are so far setting the hospital up to be a cover for a fraudulent money laundering scam, citing facts that demonstrate this could be true nationwide and worldwide, and I can't help wondering (true or not) whether this is also a picture of George's life somehow, a fraudulent scam covered with a surface of nice life.

Skipping loads more stuff. (Apologies to sex scene enthusiasts.) We're about to go full psyche here. I will forego other screenshots in favor of George's good leg while I keep speculating on the movie.

Please note that these closeups of 'human parts', as it were, come hot on the heels of seeing the despair of a dirty room packed full of depressed and despondent nonwhite people waiting to be medically examined, and the only attendent around is a sort of receptionist, an older Sister in white Catholic looking garb calling out numbers, as opposed to names. Everyone in this room is nameless, everyone is beaten down somehow, and none of them try to escape, as George does.

In earlier scenes we get closeups in the wheelchair with George more clothed underneath, and since I skipped so much, you don't know he's literally fresh from his recovery room after surgery, insisting that Zoe take him on another tour, where he wheeled away even from her and hijacked a broken elevator down to ground floor to arrive in what looks like a third world hellhole. But just outside this door is first world sunshine and freedom. His white privilege is failing him. Yeah, you get a LOT of stuff in this movie.

That bloody stump is missing parts. That good leg is available parts. We are not getting face shots in these scenes. We are getting someone desperately clawing to escape becoming more parts. Seriously, what was up with that weird black bird flying around that old guy? The bird from the painting.

I know, the lighting is just weird enough to look like old bruises moving around that good leg.

If someone grabbed my ankle like that, their face would be smashed up and bleeding because I am so ticklish. I doubt morphine would have made it easier to drag me in.

In a really elaborate psychological sense, George seems eviscerated by something coming up in his life, and one has to wonder if this is just about turning 40. We've had so many things dragged into this movie between all the layers, to me it's looking like a damning life review that goes far beyond possible fixations and personal cover ups and hurt relationships. The disease resistant plant, the magic bottle, the knife set, the photo album- all those birthday gift memories came back full force as a TV ad *after* his leg was amputated. Can the surreal get any more surreal?

Yes. Yes, it can.

You know you're a minecrafter when you think, "Glowstone!"

During another look back at the night before, along with a huge load of more weird hinting, we see George reaching out to shake his son's hand, as if this is so long and not just good night.

After the other short glimpses we've seen of him interacting with his kids, this scene comes along and blows us out of the water about the divergence between his inner world and his world with his family. Is George using his son to narrate how he's feeling inside? Is he trying to see himself through other eyes?

Tell you what, I'm going to drop this like a hot rock right there and say GET THIS MOVIE. It's not anything like the trailer, it's freaky deeper than it lets on, and you can't tell how twisted this can still possibly get, like literally, I stopped the movie right here just so I could finish this and then hog the rest for myself.

Are you up to this level of psyche in a blender reveal? You can buy or rent this movie via several outlets including Amazon and youtube for as little as 2.99 or 3.99, and I've seen it on ebay for 2.99, other outlets around 4.99 and up. If you're burned out on Halloween movies, this is a great one for the really strange 2020 we've all had.

**Pinky** · 10-17-2020, 09:30 PM

follow up to my Sublime (2007) review

originally published 10-14-20 (this is not a Tom-centric writeup but this movie was really good)

I don't often do this, if at all (so super rare), especially when I'm focusing on only one aspect, character, or actor of a project. I was so impressed with Sublime (2007) that I had to go down several rabbit holes digging up info completely aside from the #TomCavanaghWatch.

Sometimes extras or features on DVDs are just snippets of things that logically would have been part of the film, or behind the scenes and short expressions about the project by cast and crew. The Special Features on the Sublime movie DVD are different, which ultimately led me to discovering this is film series.

From Warner Bros. press release Home Entertainment February 2008

Films under the Raw Feed banner are a mix of thriller, horror, and sci-fi with a strong psychological and dramatic edge, and are as much psychological as they are thriller or horror genre. The films have been released on DVD in rated and uncut versions, featuring innovative extra features and bonus content. The Raw Feed label originated from the creative minds of Tony Krantz, Daniel Myrick and John Shiban. The first film in the series, Rest Stop (written and directed by Shiban), debuted on DVD in October 2006, followed by Sublime (directed by Krantz) in March 2007 and Believers (directed by Myrick) in October 2007. The fourth film in the series, the satiric black comedy Otis, also directed by Krantz, will be released this summer.

So Sublime is the second in a series of four movies. (Off topic, but this reminds me of the Metal Hurlant series.)

One of the features is titled The Shabeen Josie, and the closest to English translation I seem to get is Urdu (by way of Somali) Josie of the Night. As written in the product description online, ""The Shebeen Josie": Inside an African Juke Joint, a Conversation Between a Beverly Hills Housewife and a Demon" which was actually fairly disturbing, BUT we find out what was in the IV bag. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs not only rocked Mandingo through the movie, but crushed it as the Demon in this feature (nod to Cheryl aka Carolyn Hennesy, I could feel her melting into the Demon's touch).

Another neato thing on the special features is Bird York singing Have No Fear, which was later used in the 2008 Will Smith movie Seven Pounds.

Kathleen York is also a prolific actress, easily recognized from many other projects. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0948723/

I could bluster on about the cast involved in this Sublime film project, but my day is tight and I've gotta keep moving. Must mention I appreciate the set team, I loved the Grieves house.

Couple quick comments on the movie as a whole-

I love psychological layering, this was maxed out and still held water. You really don't know where all this is coming from except it's George's mind, but the complexity of allthethings grinding through his mind while he's oblivious that he's literally very physically exploring the disconnects within his own brain synapses from the surgical accident and his own brain letting him know there is just no way out of this was exponentially heartbreaking when you realize how trapped he is with his demons.

I honestly don't think my husband would survive this movie and go on with any medical procedures the rest of his life. In that sense, this movie is extremely compelling and utterly successful as an existentially layered horror thriller. I'm not typically a horror movie fan, but I'm actually very happy with this purchase.

Kudos to Tom Cavanagh pulling all this acting off mostly laying down. The part where George is completely restrained and full hookup (for filming, not actual) is bad enough on the psyche, but to lay there acting out being tortured in the most painful ways possible is beyond anything I can ride along with as a viewer without feeling very sick.

**Pinky** · 10-17-2020, 09:36 PM

thoughts about George in his broken brain in Sublime (2007)

originally published on 10-16-20

This is super random like a writing prompt and not intended to be part of the review, and is especially super spoilery if you haven't seen the movie yet, so go watch it first before you wander back.

I've blogged before about movies / TV shows and characters being how we emotionally connect into stories that we personalize while we deal with or process our own life journeys. The movie Sublime that I have reviewed recently has been one of those uncanny connects for me.

I spent years publicly blogging my own 'mess' of 'glitchy brain' fail that began, in part, in 2004 with what my doctors assumed to be a viral infection on top of years of autoimmune challenges. That is one of the layers I've been processing through. When this happens to an already fractured mind from childhood trauma and a lifetime of PTSD, I'm here to say it can be pretty devastating but survivable.

I'll jump right in. When George asks to be taken on a tour of the broken East Ward presumably under construction, he doesn't realize he's surveying his own brain fail. I've had numerous dreams like this over several years, it really does work like this when you are trying to figure out the problems that you can't see and your brain starts helping you consciously assess internal damage from the point of view of an entity that isn't human like you are, because it's existence is lived as an organ that processes data. Oddly, brains can't just type us notes, so they 'simulate' scenarios. If we break it on down, a brain as an organized entity is itself made up of numerous selves that continually work on construction and vital systems management protocols, like securing and shipping energy and oxygen. When shipping and/or nutrients are interrupted, the entire system can plunge into massive fail.

A brain is a living thing that wants to work properly. Like a machine, it runs automatically without our cognition, but like an AI, it connects to us and talks to us in dreamscapes, riddles, visuals, experiences. Our brains can interact with us as a separate entity from us, yet still be one with us. Consciousness, arguably, is not completely dependent on the brain, although the brain is how our consciousness is able to interact in this world reality we see around us with other people in it.

During this tour of the East Ward, George chances upon a room full of files, a sort of archive of information. It is organized but the version is outdated, a hard copy backup of a digital system. He finds his own file with his name on it, and in the very thick file he sees hard copy of many organ and tissue assessments. This is literally what the brain does, in one sense. Our brains know everything conceivable about what goes on in our bodies, that is their job. When there is brain disconnect, or fail, that information can stop being updated, or even be lost, and the brain automatically fills it back in with real time information gathered from what we'd think of as diagnostics. I went through this when I went through central nerve fail and memory glitching. I could feel this happening. Sometimes it was painful, most of it was maddening from a conscious aspect. I didn't know what was happening, but over time, with very patient inner communication, I was able to consciously piece together my own archive of thoughts and reflections about what I was experiencing as my brain was working on healing.

Let's talk movie clues.

When George is arguing with the care team (in his mind, since the IV bag fluid is milky white), the date on the file he found, according to the medical lawyer (a brain perspective trying to share information to his consciousness), was Feb. 29, 1947. That was not a leap year. (That had also changed from what he saw originally.) But there is also a name connected to that file that George thought was his, that actually of George Spelvin, if I heard that correctly (I could be wrong, I suck at transcription). If this is the case, then the pseudonym and nondate are key clues, along with the unidentified bandaged man that George thought he saw murdered, are really himself as an empty slot. The file contents are his own brain content being interpreted, the file identification shifts between the time he discovers it and later argues with the medical lawyer. His 'evidence' is slippery, and his brain is filling in the lawyer's words with substitute answers. Is his brain updating in progress, indicating more loss? Or is this like a dreamscape where hope plays tricks and information is slippery anyway? In any case, his brain itself is aware of loss, but communicating that into his consciousness isn't easy. George is in full fight or flight mode by the time he seizes out during his brain slamming another fail simulation at him, his necrotic leg. That scene is a giveaway since necrosis to that extent takes time. The brain is screaming that it cannot find his leg, it cannot connect and assess, but in George's consciousness (in his vegetative state), it becomes interpreted as a diseased and then missing leg.

The mystery of problem solving inside a broken brain can send a person hurtling around an emotional rollercoaster. It's hard. I was very struck by the opening theme by Bird York, Have No Fear. It's nearly impossible not to have fear when your nervous system is part of the breakage. It's like living inside downed wires and massive grid damage when you can't move around correctly or easily speak what you mean. It's like feeling trapped in a maze of confusion, so much fail going on and no way to share the fear in a way that nets back badly needed emotional support. And sometimes that support is so misunderstood in all the confusion that one can only recoil back into solitude. I have thankfully never experienced a vegetative state, but at one point I made the decision to wrap my mind around preparing for the what ifs of a complete communication sever. The intuitive response is to fight, that can translate into combative patient and poor treatment, and I chose to bend my will toward remaining calm, accepting, and pleasant, trusting what I could not trust. That is very hard. (The key to accomplishing this is to, as George found, wrestle one's demons, face the truths inside that we refused to see, and acknowledge our life fail of allowing bad things to happen, very much like a life review.)

Add to all the confusing emotional rollercoaster the jumble of real life still coming at you, the torments and persecutions of judgments from people all around you, whether those are perceived correctly or not. George reliving memories of his birthday party, assuming he was even remembering correctly, was part of the big puzzle, many pieces that needed reassembling before he could cognitively understand how to take action months after a medical accident. To recognize that he had this power to make a decision was a giant lightbulb after so much misery.

One thing this kind of life challenge wakes you up to is information. Information in general from everywhere, everywhen. Time has no meaning when one is compiling information trying to restructure. Sorting things like timestamps comes later. I personally developed an obsession with timestamps because I lost my sense of time. What I discovered was compiled information.

Using twitter as an example, I am unable to keep up with real time linear interaction flow. For a long time I couldn't keep users straight, much less their personal information that made them unique. I learned to use the twitter search bar with keywords and hashtags to pull up a time order for users and particular thoughts, and I was able to remember the timestamps for some reason. I noticed that a person might say 12 different times over 4 years how terribly sick they were, and then at other times say they never get sick. In their linear experience, they might not remember, while they are in a vital healthy phase, regularly picking up seasonal colds that last a week. I could easily pull up their histories and see that while we are in linear experience mode, we are in the moment and don't pull up all the files. Once we step out of linear experience mode, we can see all the files more easily. Well, I crashed out of linear experience mode early in life when I started dissociating, and parts of me are 'research hounds', obsessed with finding and knowing information for various reasons. Add a 'brain crash' to that and I felt like I simply dropped out of humanity synch with world time. I used social medias like twitter to see the rhythm and try to slide back into it (like jumping into an ongoing jumprope game, perhaps). I'm still not very good at that and eventually let go of trying to keep up in real time. I live in my own real time now.

We cannot explore all the files this way until we step back from in the moment reacting. George tries to react in the movie, but he's lost his moment and can't find the way back to that moment. He's stuck on a moment unaware that months of time have been passing, trying to problem solve what went wrong with very minimal access to information. He can see the broken parts, and he can see the diagnostics, but he can't see how he himself fits into that.

What he didn't expect to see were the jagged details of collected memories exposed in the brokenness, his demons, if you will. Evidently, George was very aware of the political divergence going on around the world that supported his real life success. He was aware of the human abuses going on that supported capital gains in his world. He chose not to 'see' them while he was in the moment. He believed he deserved his success because he had earned it himself. Likewise, he had chosen not to really 'see' or be cognizant of how his wife was feeling. The simulations are valid communications about his fears and feelings and situations, but since he cannot translate them logically, they create panic. His fear grips him and then all he can think about is feeling trapped and wanting to escape.

I can say that level of vividness is very real with 'broken brain' stuff. It's catastrophic to realize we are stuffed full of information that we don't even know we have. All our brains are absorbing all the things all day long. Good things, bad things, all the things. We might consciously choose to focus on our own interests as the days go by, but that doesn't mean all this other information collecting going on constantly is being deleted as overage. It's all still there, and it's all important. Why are things we ignore important? Good question, especially since humans seem to universally experience compelling life review phenomena.

When I see George really noticing these political atrocities among his jagged broken East Ward, I see him realizing the reality of what hadn't been real to him, real people, real lives affected in the kind of life he had been constructing for himself. Whether they were actually fallout from his own financial decision making is probably beside the point, because who could know that. In general, however, there was a connection, he knew it was all connected, and he chose in his linear in the moment life to not see those connections. He turned away from taking responsibility. That this is affecting him so much in the dreamscape simulations is a very strong hint that he went out of his way to stifle these feelings in his everyday life. He stayed busy making money, probably nightcapping his way through his marriage after long days of wheeling and dealing. I can't judge since I don't know, but it's looking like the rude awakening after the brain fail was a seething pile of guilt he managed to lock away for years.

How one heals from a broken brain, assuming one has that option (like me), can involve a very deep dive into cleaning out one's soul. Pulling everything out of the closets of the mind, sorting through it all, repacking and organizing- this is all inherently part of healing when a mind scatters into pieces after the structure crumbles. Restructuring is rebuilding. I think at one point I compared it to reassembling a building piece by piece out of the original materials without a blueprint after it had been blown apart. That was so many years ago I can't find which blog I wrote that on.

:edit: Found it. "Like someone reconstructing an earthquake smashed mansion brick by broken brick without a plan, I am reconstructing my brain today. Like someone who lived in that mansion, I know I lived in my brain, and I know it's all still here. So I glitched again, so what. It's not gone. I just have to go over all the little connections and see what needs to be plugged back in." Dec. 27, 2012

Having our consciousness interrupted from illness or injury is a terrible thing. I compared losing my intellectual capability to beautiful people losing their good looks to some calamity, which we all know can be very devastating. I became very dumb and spent years crawling back from that. I consciously could not logically piece together my own history. I've had to wait while my brain heals bit by slow bit.

In George's case, there was no more healing. Nothing more could be done to cross back into the 'real' world of linear in the moment with his family. He had healed just enough to become minimally aware that he had a choice whether to stay or leave. Whether he was truly cognitive of his family around him is unclear, and as messed up as his awareness was anyway, we'd still only be guessing at what he truly was aware of at the end. However, he did seem, inside his head, to be aware enough of himself to reject remaining in that state. Even on life support he managed to 'escape'. There would be no way to measure if he truly did that or if his brain just stopped working, since he was considered to be effectively medically unable to ever respond again.

I could be like Fangoria and talk about Sublime's "health scare plan", but I'm not going there. I do think it's valid, though. Click to go check out issue 261 published on 9-28-19.

That's all I've got for now, busy week. 8 days till my birthday, lot going on around here till then. Laterz.

**Pinky** · 10-28-2020, 10:14 AM

cont George notes

Originally published 10-19-20

The real loss, the thought of his wife leaving him after all that time spent on his job to make her happy as the measuring stick of his success in life ultimately turning into losing his leg in his mind as his brain kept failing was the final stab. After that, he had nothing left to hold on to while the rest of the guilts still left in the gathered form of Mandingo kept stabbing and cutting away at the rest of his sense of self.

I had thought in the first part of this ongoing commentary (I think this is part 4 now) that it was like George was emotionally eviscerating himself out of guilt with a real bowel evac and puncture as part of a vivid backdrop, not yet knowing the depths of this story. Going back over the entire story again and again keeps peeling back layers of encrypted enculturation that somehow haunted his entire working life. We begin to see his complicity, however passive, in the enculturation of ignorance as a rationale for his entire way of life. His son got it, while adults all around him missed it. His brother got it and easily diagnosed the root of the problem. His wife, left out of George's emotional shutdown loop, might have been mortified to think she was the justification for his wilful ignorance of financial consequences, but we never get to find that out.

When we hear the Have No Fear theme arrive with Jenny to find George staring into the pool, we see George at his lowest point before the procedure the next day. At this point, a person could wonder if all the rest is a complete fiction and what we see in the movie is his hell of spiritual self flagellation while he's actually drowning in the pool, justifying that the colonoscopy would have killed him anyway.

This movie was that layered and that weird. It's my 5th viewing and I'm still pulling it all apart. Notice I didn't even start on Zoe. She was the most fictional of all, and the one he hung onto right up to the end.

**Pinky** · 10-28-2020, 02:07 PM

all the ways Sublime (2007) ruined me

Originally published on pinky blog. (if links break, check with original publish to get to link sources)

snips clicks to source

The more I tried to be done with Sublime, the more it gripped me and I kept coming up with ever so many questions. This movie is obviously commentary under the guise of psychological thriller. I'm not equipped for this level of scrutiny without some kind of help, so I finally approached Scott and asked him to watch a movie with me that would forever ruin him going to any doctor the rest of his life, and he said absolutely not. One glance at the cover and he literally left the room. I'm on my own.

My biggest challenge is keeping a storyline timeline since my own time orientation is screwed and I still have enough short term memory fuzz to not quite be sure of things. Going back over Sublime was a delightfully daunting exercise (Pinky says you guys know I like it hard), but it has taken a few days to settle into a think piece. Some of the memory scenes were logical, but toward the end it felt more smeared together, like George was kinda losing the last of his memories or something. I couldn't tell if we were seeing him wildly misinterpreting realities that had actually happened, like he simply just couldn't reconcile the two anyway (even before the brain damage), or we were getting real story memories that he could no longer see himself. Either way, the misinterpretations were tragic, even if he recognized the problems spot on, because there was absolutely nothing he could do about them.

The most obvious thing in the entire movie is Mandingo, and slapping that bad boy into google search was not disappointing. Or maybe it was. Urban dictionary had me cringing, geographical history had me going srsly, wtf?, and movie history had me facepalming like how in crap's name did something like THAT wind up in a rotten tomatoes review on this planet? I was slinking around the internet slapping my forehead going OHHHHhhhhh.....

After that I raced into my bedroom to grab a spiral and ripped through 4 pages of very sloppy very fast questions. Whoever put this movie together was either a genius or had some really deep revenge issues, so there I went again on another search and learned many things about Tony Krantz.

Krantz's opportunity to direct came with the development of the Raw Feed project, a series of direct-to-DVD movies that represented a first of this format for Warner Bros. Studios under their Warner Home Video division.^[14] Krantz told Elyse Eisenberg at Warner Home Video that his dream since the third grade was to direct. Eisenberg told him "Warner Bros would approve you as a director in a heartbeat."^[3] So Krantz became part of a trio of directors (alongside Daniel Myrick, director of The Blair Witch Project and John Shiban, writer and executive producer for Supernatural and The X-Files)^[4] who were tapped to create "Raw Feed," a series of films in the sci fi, horror, and thriller genres. In March 2007, the second film in the 6-part film series, a surreal psychological sci-fi thriller called Sublime, that marked Krantz's first directorial effort, was released. The film was directed by Krantz and written by Erik Jendresen. Krantz described it as "a thinking man's horror film" with a huge twist at the end.^[15] In 2008, the fourth film of the Raw Feed series, a black comedy/horror film entitled Otis was released. The film was co-penned by Jendresen and directed by Krantz during an 18-day shoot. The film stars Daniel Stern, Illeana Douglas and Kevin Pollak.^[16] In a 2008 interview at SXSW where it opened the festival in its midnight slot, Krantz described Otis as a purposeful satire on the over-abundance of torture and gore porn movies, but also a "meditation on the Iraq war."^[15]

Not just another scary film.

I think the result is a movie that will utterly ruin a non-thinking man's relationship with doctors the rest of his life. My poor husband.

Ok, so I've been busy and haven't had the time to pen this all out, so I'm going to leave it in my questions/statements format and maybe toss in some thoughts. It's not terribly organized because it's raw brain melt. If you haven't seen Sublime yet, go do that and then help me out here.

Ned

The way George sees himself is through his son filming a documentary on how he sees himself. (Loop cycle layers.)

The infection (abscess) in his chest is George's diseased attitude.

The double (triple) scene- filters, how we see things internally.

Mandingo- fear

Ned reminds George of his role (fatherly kiss)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Zoe became primary interactive mode

Zoe literally on the stump

Complexities of Zoe- She hurt him but snuck in to briefly "care" about him- this scene back to back with wife scene

With Zoe George was still "master" or authority.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jenny

Barely mentioned history of volunteer work abroad before she married.

George assumes his wife would leave him for another man and he didn't exactly beg her to stay

Pre defensive posture, self fulfilling destiny

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mandingo

undoing the 1975 film?

running it backward?

magic?

Mandingo character is about control, neglect, abuse, slavery (including debt slavery) and corruption in corporate/govt policy and either revenge or restitution

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How do Zoe and Mandingo fit together?

Zoe is quiet (complicit?) in the face of confrontation.

Zoe assuages complicity with illusion, reality layered with fiction

Zoe is the key to Mandigo

white male privilege

George couldn't reconcile reality with cover up without costing his heart and soul

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chloe

Is George assuming Chloe is lesbian? This isn't clear.

The faceless man in the bed next to George says it doesn't matter.

AND is George the hero of her innocence with his interpretation of his love for her?

He was going to tell her Yes.

Give her his permission to love whomever she desired, perhaps.

Role of the father (sexually) to hand off daughter.

George never verbally acknowledges this to Chloe.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What does Ravyn represent to George? (the black bird swooping around)

Cadavergirl, the final emasculation

What was the point of the Yes scene?

The Stump.

Ravyn wants to see the stump. Ravyn is in control. She is named Death.

Longshot- Is it possible George is/feels responsible for Chloe being gay? Do we get a hint of "filled with love" being shunned? Does this relate to a child/fetus being killed in the 1975 Mandingo film?

Ravyn wants to see the stump.

Death wants to cut it off.

Judge and jury.

Cadavergirl is representative to Mandingo culture oppression.

Mandingo doesn't interrupt Chloe and Ravyn like he does Ned.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chloe is guilt.

Ned is reflection.

Ravyn is judgment.

Mandingo is executioner.

Brother Billy is prosecutor.

Wife Jenny is ____? Reason <-- layered meanings.

Zoe is excuse, alibi, distraction, connection.

Zoe crosses into the broken world as the narrative. ("I'm not supposed to be here.")

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lotta questions there. I went in so many directions peeling back so many layers, and there aren't actually answers to some things as far as I can see, but in a nutshell, Imma psyche analyze this now-

George is a guilt-ridden financial success because emotionally (spiritually) he's an utter failure with a plant dying, his beautiful wife thinking about leaving him, his intelligent son mildly condescending to him, his daughter possibly brushing off finding a copy of her daddy to reproduce with, his brother mocking his social intelligence (below the belt on his birthday), and the rest of his 'friends' (soulless) at his birthday being a jerk lawyer, a greedy neighbor, and a guy we never get a full name on and who George doesn't notice tries to talk to him by the pool. PJ sat at George's right hand during the jello birthday song, on his left hand during his Last Supper birthday photo shoot, which would make him James the Greater in the painting, Jesus' first follower. Significant to Sublime?

I'd say why yes, yes it is significant.

I ran back through all the birthday scenes to confirm that PJ is the one person that we know nothing about, even though he was a significantly comfortable part of George's birthday party, and the only person George didn't see in his memories or in his broken delusions after the medical accident. In fact, I got to wondering if George ever even makes eye contact with or personally addresses PJ in the movie at all, things I normally miss anyway because my own real life EQ is so dismal, and dang, even Jenny tells George that PJ came out to talk to him by the pool, and George didn't respond, obviously hadn't even noticed him.

Is PJ a token black in George's friend set? Is he the biggest clue to George's inner guilt over white privilege?

I think I can finally walk away from this movie satisfied. I knew I couldn't put a finger on what was eating away at me, Krantz brilliantly exploded that into my brain once I dug in some more.

And shouldn't that have been more obvious??? Dart to my own heart, Krantz.

This movie is a 2020 must see. Here, have a shopping link.

And since I'm remembering that this is actually a continued Tom watch review, here you go, have some pretty Tom pix. Sorry about forgetting I was doing that. Good thing I don't write for money, I'd be fired. If you look closely throughout this scene, his pupils do some funky things, probably all that lighting, but don't worry, they're perfectly normal and round when you do zooms through other scenes. I know some people are really into weird eye stuff. Since I'm light sensitive, I notice these things, too.

**Pinky** · 10-31-2020, 05:00 PM

Cold Squad "Taggert Family" (1998), Tom Cavanagh

Originally published on pinky blog. (If links break during repaste, find original link sources through the blog post.)

Laptop screencaps used in not for profit blog episode and character reviews and film study.
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."

My Halloween countdown Creepy Tom Watch concludes with Tom Cavanagh's role as Spencer Taggert in season 1 episode 5 of Cold Squad, a Canadian crime show that ran in the late 1990s to 2005.

As deep dig actor watches go, sometimes you hit gold in youtube and find out things are a little mislabeled but still totally worth the time. Thank you, hardcore fan who apparently joined youtube just to share really old Tom Cavanagh filmography. I got your back fixing this one. Here is the show if anyone wants to check it out. Comments there suggest other youtubers and Hulu if you are interested in a complete Cold Squad series rewatch.

Description on youtube-

This is the Tom Cavanagh Episode of Cold Squad from Canadian Television. The episode aired in 1998 Cold Squad was a Canadian police procedural television series first broadcast in 1998 that followed the investigations of a part of the Vancouver Police Department Homicide Division tasked with solving cold cases, the titular Cold Squad, as led by Sergeant Ali McCormick Episode description Ali revisits the case of Barbara Taggert, a mother who was killed in a house fire in 1995 that was ruled an arson. Her daughter Lisa disappeared that night and was presumed abducted.

clicks to imdb

Spencer Taggert's wife was violently murdered and his daughter abducted two years ago and he was cleared as a suspect. Here we see him still employed with his father-in-law. Spencer is a nice guy, by all accounts.

Two years ago, Spencer was in business with a compulsive liar named Bill Harris who came around to visit a lot before the murder, but he, too, was cleared as a suspect in both the murder and abduction. Because Bill showed back up in custody for unrelated charges, dominos got bumped and the cold case was reopened. Sadly, Spencer got dragged back into the questioning.

Since this is very early Tom Cavanagh filmography, I'm getting a ridiculous amount of screencaps. You're welcome. Imma randomly talk like this in between them. You get a lot of what I fondly call "classic Tom", but where some might inadvertently typecast themselves, Tom somehow manages to convincingly pull off the transition from crushing innocence to stone cold killer, which actually made me feel a little ill. (I can't help internalizing, I tend to steer clear of crime shows.)

Even from one frame to another you can see the range of internal emotional responses in his eyes alone, like the surprise he suppressed when asked point blank whether he started the fire, which I think makes this creepy guy all the more convincing since I felt that lurch of don't get caught in the pit of my stomach as I watched it. Go watch it.

Tom is a natural chameleon in this very limited role where frame to frame convincingly locks the narrative into place, so watching this show as a film study is rewarding. All the acting is really good, and they have to be to rock out such a complex story so quickly.

Remember the distraught widower who brings in new evidence confessing he was cheating on his wife that night and has that other witness. If he'd really been guilty, surely he'd have used this card the first time around. Still...

Because it took an undercover officer to dig out his true colors. Makes you wonder how many other people can pull off living with secrets like this guy. It was touch and go and very tricky getting this guy to spill.

The lengths they went to just gaining his trust set my nerves off. I'd probably be way more trigger happy.

Lol, keeping an eye out for cops... Irony is fun.

You prove it, no you prove it, no you prove it first... Cop walking that edge over and over, winding up maced in the eyes, no wonder so many crimes are never solved. This was a LOT of work.

Progress creeped along, but it didn't stall. I couldn't believe this guy actually yapped out his intentions to kill again.

Time to put all that work to the test. Will he confess????

The intensity escalated to the point where I'd have broke, killed the guy, and run. I just can't trust.

Nearly there. *edge of my seat*

And without warning, we're going there, flipping the deck and demanding proof the suspect isn't the undercover cop, stripping naked. O_O Holy cow.

And he liked it. Mr. Exhibitionist started blurting all of it. While the team listened in, our boy hammered Spencer with question after question and Spencer was tickled as a naked man can be just blurting it all out. Total psycho. This calls for extra extra screenshots.

Yeah, that sad widower was waiting his whole life for this moment. We can only imagine the rush he was feeling. Naked. How dark is this show, srsly.

Can you just see it. "How was work today?" "I played a naked psycho. It was exhausting."

The satisfaction of imploding fanfic authors into an all new frenzy.

Sorry, was going off track. I'm not a fanfic author, my work here is already done.

But the show must go on! "What about the little girl?"

Psycho sickos and their weird little trust games.

Tom gets a little shovel action in this script. Imma stop there because the rest is really dark, literally and figuratively, and screenshots aren't as clear. I've been pretty thrilled about being able to get so many pretty good ones for such an old film project.

That was fun! =D

It's even more fun to compare old Tom to new Tom, so here is a brand new upload from just yesterday. Tom is lending his voice to the LGS Foundation, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, a rare and severe form of childhood-onset epilepsy, through research, programs and education." Please check them out, sign up for news and events, and thank you very kindly if you are able to help with donations. There will be a charity auction tomorrow (November 1st, 2020) during the LGS Awareness Day, along with a concert featuring Noah Guthrie. Get a cool LGS Awareness tee, and please share this video to your social medias and help Tom spread this information! Thank you.

**Pinky** · 11-21-2020, 11:05 AM

Love Monkey (TV Series 2006-) wtf did I just sit thru

Originally posted on pinky blog. Broken links from repaste can be found on original publish.

My very first impression of Love Monkey (2006-) was that it feels like a conceptual smash between How I Met Your Mother and a grown up version of Boy Meets World. I normally hang out in scifi land, or at least go for action with chases and explosions, so I assumed Love Monkey would be a little stultifying in the 'regular TV' sense. I was wrong. Starting that series was like jump starting a stick shift on a steep hill in the dead of night. I went on full alert upon launch between narration, multiple character intros, multiple subtle cues and hints, and hard transitions between scenes.

Quote- The first episode aired on January 17, 2006, on CBS, attracting an audience of about 8.6 million viewers. By its third episode on February 7, viewership was down to 6.2 million, and CBS pulled it from the schedule.

I'm not sure if CBS thought Love Monkey bit off a little more than the audience could chew (since it was almost immediately canceled), but a marathon of only 8 episodes had me so dizzy from continual fast paced dialogue that I almost gave up and just turned it into an actor spotting sport. For example, Ivana Milisevic from The 100 was in Love Monkey. She's a badass, so that totally kept me watching. If you go on a Love Monkey bender, prepare to brake for IMDb lookups.

Thankfully, I did a little more research than that and then went back to it with fresh eyes, and actually quite liked it, although I'll have a little commentary on what I think happened with the ratings. I actually wound up liking it way better than most friend group shows I've avoided through the years, mostly because it wasn't dumbed down with a laugh track and had intelligent dialogue, and I wound up going back and rewatching the whole thing because I appreciated that.

Do people prefer sitcoms with laugh tracks or without?

Quick heads up for occasional extremely slow fadeouts. Extremely. Slow.

Love Monkey was actually reimagined from a novel of the same name, although quite a few changes were made for the TV series. The original novel was written by, of all people, a film critic, but the TV series drastically spiffs up our main character Tom (played by Tom Cavanagh, so we have Tom the actor and Tom the character) with a much cooler job (that needed too much narration to establish) and apparently a better body, so if the high paced dialogue content and jumpy scene transitions are too head spinny, you can always go chill with the book and feel sorry for pudgy Tom at the tabloid. If pretty Tom the actor as handsome Tom the character with a real life and a cool job at a record label can't launch this story all spiffed up, pretty sure pudgy Tom the book character can't win over Julia. I could be wrong, I haven't read it. And then the music biz stuff in the TV show was a bit busy, although it did hold its story integrity. Any kind of talent scouting is rigorous in its own right, so building a 'friend show' around that kind of a job was probably a little grueling. When I found out the original Tom character was working at a tabloid in the novel, I just shook my head. The leap to TV idealism was possibly a bit overdone.

I don't usually have concerns over content cramming in TV shows, but each segment in Love Monkeys was power packed with content, and if the content switching between scenes had been as slow as the fadeouts, it might have kept those 2M viewers that dropped off. Just having to stay alert enough through every episode to transition with scene changes felt a lot like watching high school basketball from mid point floor bleacher, lot of head swiveling trying to follow the ball. I felt like the scenes could have been paced out a little bit, possibly 8 eps could have been 16. It made the friend group feel a little too tight. Otherwise the show itself was really good, in my opinion, and I don't say that lightly for these kinds of shows. Maybe the timing was off or something, like Mystery Men.

Speaking of basketball, my favorite scenes in Love Monkey were the basketball scenes. I say this as a person who has seen the Harlem Globetrotters twice, watched a lot of college basketball on TV, sat by Jackie Crawford in my chemistry class, and had a daughter on high school varsity. I never even noticed Tom Cavanagh before The Flash, but I'd definitely watch him in a movie about basketball.

Star of Ed knows way around court- "During the late 1980s, the six-foot guard played for five years at the Canadian intercollegiate level while attending Queen's University in Kingston, Ont."

Getting back around to Love Monkey, my most basic basic takeaway is that Tom the character hits a sort of self revelation through a song an undiscovered young man is singing in a local bar/lounge/dance something, and suddenly realizes that song is about his own love life. Since he's a music scout for a record label, it's natural for him to scoop up talent, but in this case he winds up entangling the way the lyrics bring out his feels, coincidentally about the time he begins a new life with a new label after being fired from the original, ironically timed with his incompatible girlfriend (whose singing sucks) dumping him because he's as clueless as my own husband (I actually find that endearing, I kept my husband), inspiring his friends to push him to go find 'the one', his "Mrs. Tom".

In Facebook speak, it's complicated.

And that's probably the best way to review Love Monkey. It's complicated.

But my goal is to find out whether Tom Cavanagh shaves or brushes his teeth in this show, so I committed to searching out free fan sharing, which was thankfully most of it, bless fandom hearts, so it's not exactly definitive, but I submit that it can still be conclusive, based on what I could find. Which was most of it. If Tom shaved or brushed his teeth in any of the missing segments in the seventh episode, I'm going to be very disappointed in fandom fail when I find out. If you'd like to catch up on this series, it's been on youtube for about 12 years now.

I cannot paste over the clickable playlist here, but you can go there any time.
https://youtu.be/C9mu3NjQ2cI?list=PL...wQXY2fF5P4No_3

Other than a few minor editing problems, though, the story was actually pretty intriguing. Nearly every scene I was making bets what Tom the character would do or say next, along with his friends, apparently. They knew him well. This is kind of where the show hooked me and reeled me in, because I've never had a little coterie of friends synch bombing me on pronoun usage, so when they got to 'her' vs 'it', I discovered I was already on the stringer and stopped fighting it. I admit I downloaded this series.

You guys realize I'm making this longer so I can slide in more screenshots, right. This is a Tom watch, after all. You're welcome. (If you follow Tom Cavanagh around filming just to gaze on him, this series is perfect for you. It's full of costume and scene changes highlighting main actor.)

I'll be honest, when I first started this review, it was more along the lines of What are the writers doing to me?, hence the title. Because I'm horrible for judging other writers harshly, particularly when they are working on big money projects, I've gotta be honest and say Love Monkey the TV series was way too content crammed for the average person coming home after work wanting to relax into some entertainment, and I think the way the scripts were jammed into the filming style is what killed it. When I'm watching a scene in a public area where two characters are talking, I don't want to see a fuzzy closeup of someone's head walking through spoiling the shot. Many of the scene backgrounds were so 'busy' with detail or extraneous movement that needed to be filtered back out that it became work to watch the show. For me, a person who doesn't filter detail well, and I suspect there are plenty of us (since 2M viewers dropped off so immediately), Love Monkey quickly became a grind through high speed content filtering in order to follow the story. Between the script writing and film editing, I nearly jumped off this train myself. This is a good story. Perhaps the storytelling method itself could have been reimagined.

This is the song that inspired the storytelling narrative in the TV series. click for lyrics Find more Teddy Geiger on youtube. The original novel title "Love Monkey" was inspired by an unrelated song lyric.

**Pinky** · 12-01-2020, 03:29 PM

I bin a bad Love Monkey

Originally published on pinky blog.

Sorry, guys, I got so distracted that I didn't realize I'd chopped off some of my content! This is what happens when you're juggling 5 things at a time. The most important screenshot came this close to the Tom Cavanagh shave or brush teeth challenge, so technically he's there but it never got filmed, so this one is a big old NO.

I do have a few more Tom ss for you tho, again, my bad for burying these under a pile of other stuff in my phone.

See, I thought the series was going toward these two eventually realizing they were each others' destinies, but either I'm a poor judge or this show turned into a cameo production to promote new music talent or something, but yeah.

Random snip click that wasn't blurry.

I looked up feckless, btw. Yes, seriously. I think it's dumb that the only types I hear use it in sentences, on film or in real life, are better-than-thou types. I'm assuming that means the writer throwing it into the dialogue was one of those types, which makes sense because this show is so jammed packed with dialogue and narrating scenes that I barely had time to register emotional shots before scene jumps. Not complaining, just observing. That's actually why I'm on my third watch now, because so much flies right by me. Anyway, I feel I have the right to observe this because I myself have been told a number of times I'm an intellectual snob, but I've never used feckless in my life, for real or in print. I feel like that line needs to be drawn between true intellectualism and showing off. (Ok, I just did, but you know what I mean.)

These next two are super random. You're welcome. I only got them because his makeup looks better than mine and I'm kind of jealous.

Ok, that's your Tom fix, gotta run. Have a great day.

**Pinky** · 01-05-2021, 10:56 AM

Quick update- Yes, I faceplanted the entire Tom Christmas collection during Christmas season, and I could say "due to time constraints", but I'll actually blame it on this bossy little thang keeping us all in a tizzy and then insisting on arriving early. I'll play catchup on Christmas Tom laterz.