Elena

Why do we need it, and are we getting enough?

nevver:

Blade Runner 2049, James Jean

The first time I read ‘Call Me by Your Name’ I stayed up until 4am to finish it, then immediately started over again. I’d read dozens of queer coming-of-age novels, dozens of bittersweet love stories, but nothing quite like this – a story of a once-in-a-lifetime love between precocious 17-year-old Italian Elio and 20-something cocksure American academic Oliver, played out over a brief six week period but recalled over and over for a lifetime.

It felt like the oldest story ever told and a freshly drawn secret, as though its writer, André Aciman, had articulated a collective memory of longing for the very first time. Its beauty lay in its diminutive moments, in its long, drawn-out descriptions of seconds-long glances between Elio and Oliver. My reaction during that first reading was almost more physical than intellectual, something more akin to a crush on a person, or a the way a heart skips during a particular key change in a pop song. It certainly wasn’t anything I had experienced reading a book before.

Before its release, Aciman was known for his nonfiction, chronicling his early life in the 1995 memoir ‘Out of Egypt’, and collating criticism on the work of Marcel Proust for the 2001 essay collection ‘The Proust Project’.‘Call Me by Your Name’ is his first novel, and it is all the more miraculous because it seemingly came from nowhere.

Since its release in 2007, the book has been a slow-burn kind of literary sensation, gaining new fans through enthusiastic word-of-mouth. Jim MacSweeney, manager of Gay’s the Word, the UK’s only dedicated LGBT bookshop, has seen the popularity of the book grow from the very beginning: “We sold a few copies when it first came out, then noticed that people were coming back to buy second copies for friends,” he tells me. “It’s always been an easy book to sell – it’s a love story, but it’s not sentimental. It captures something that we all feel but that is rare in fiction. It’s a really special book.”

It’s difficult to quantify what makes the book so special, what makes it so resonant in a sea of thousands and thousands of love stories, so much so that it has become a personal talisman for its thousands of fans. Sarah Dollard, a London-based screenwriter for Doctor Who and Being Human, and a huge fan of CMBYN, describes the first time she read the book: “It was less thinking and more… feeling. A lot. Clutching the book to my chest, tearful sighs… I read a lot of romance, about half of it queer, and most of it follows a formula. Not to sniff at formula – I only read writers who wield it beautifully. But CMBYN doesn’t do that, it is its own thing. A gorgeously written gut punch.”

This tension of physicality and emotional potency came up again and again when I spoke to other fans of the book. When Rachel Huskey, a student from Texas, first read it, she “didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, I just remember laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about this novel for over an hour. That had never happened to me before, it just struck me so harshly in my chest and I didn’t know how to feel. My diary entry from that day says, ‘I have a fierce desire to consume this book and I don’t know how to do it.’”

When I re-read the book last year, spurned on by the announcement of the film adaptation, it was alongside two of my friends who were reading it for the first time. We would gather in a Twitter group chat every day to pore over details of each chapter, and – crucially – discuss frankly how it revealed integral truths of the possibilities of love and desire to us, which felt especially powerful in the muddy contemporary midst of casual dating and impersonal hookup apps.

One of the other participants in this informal book club, Sophie, recalls how, “every one of our interpretations and reactions to this novel was valid, vivid, and valued. Recollections of old loves, missed opportunities, the anger and disappoint of our current stumbles through the wilds of 2010s dating… This book stripped things from me that I hid from myself, it opened up what I want love – or the idea of love – to be, and how I want my muscles to burn as I reach out for it. Like Elio, looking back over that summer with each added year of wisdom and lived experience, each re-read of CMBYN feels like a space to reflect, and hone our own needs through the lens of this one specific romance.”

For all that CMBYN describes complex romantic and sexual feelings that almost everyone can match themselves up to, it’s also full of the specificities of queer experience, refreshingly removed from the constraints of a traditional coming-out narrative. Josh Winters, a writer and musician from San Francisco, recognises the importance of this for queer readers: “Many stories about young men coming to terms with their sexuality are concerned with how they navigate the “coming out” process, usually framing it as a required rite of passage (which is it not), but Aciman is purely interested in exploring how a young man comes to embrace his desire for another man removed from any idea of potential sociopolitical impact.” It’s this removal from blatantly political context that is an unspoken requirement of queer novels that makes CMBYN so refreshing.

Eoin Dara, a curator based in Dundee, addressed the duality of the universal and the specifically queer in an email to me: “The language of longing and desire and uncertainty could be about any blossoming love affair, it’s pretty expansive and universal. But then in other ways, it’s so inexplicably caught up in the invisible politics of queer desire; the politics of looking. I love how it focuses detail so minutely on eye contact in parts: Something that’s so central to queer communication – silent, unspoken understandings and messages that bounce around public space and crowded rooms full of oblivious straights.”

There’s nothing more anxiety-inducing than the anticipation of a new version of something you love so, so much – especially if its whole worth and magic lies in its atmospherics and coded glances; the most difficult things to translate to film. It’s these ephemeral details that are most anticipated among fans of the book. “There’s a lot of small things about the story that are what give the big scenes their value,” says Rachel. “The footsie, the touch during volleyball… it’s about them being so syndicated with each other that they don’t hide anything anymore.”

Jim echoes this sentiment: “Not that much happens in the book: It’s about tension, desire, longing, rather than big events. I last read it 10 years ago and I don’t even remember the character names, but what I do remember is how Aciman captures that feeling of being aware of another person in a room, and that being all that matters. And I’m interested to see how that is translated in the film.” When asked about seeing the film, Eoin confesses that “I’m so nervous about seeing it. I hope the script is sparse, I hope the looks are long.”

In February this year, I queued up outside a cinema at the Berlinale, shaking equal parts with late-winter cold and with nerves about seeing Call Me by Your Name for the first time. I shared the same concerns as other fans of the book: This was such a precious thing, I felt like I owned it to an extent – how could I trust anyone else to understand it so fully, to feel it so completely? But the film was wonderful, lacking some of the specific narrative details of the book but so rich with what was really important: the feeling, the atmosphere, the intangibility. It is perfectly cast and perfectly paced. I wept solidly for the last 45 minutes, feeling slightly embarrassed when the lights came up and the rush of reality set back in.

There must have been a thousand people in the packed-out cinema, but it still felt like mine. “Now that the trailers are out and the press is being done in the lead up to the film’s release, it does feel a bit like when your little secret band makes it big,” says Sophie. “But now that it’s more widespread, I still don’t have a desire to discuss it beyond my little group. I am much more fulfilled to pass an image of farmer’s market peaches, or buy an exceptionally loose and wind-swept shirt to keep CMBYN present and tangible outside of the page.”

As more and more people are drawn to the book through the film release, and through passed-on copies, word-of-mouth recommendations and informal book clubs like ours, its pages will still be there for me – for all of us – as an intimate, personal comfort, to be read and felt until early in the morning for years to come.

The post How ‘Call Me by Your Name’ became a queer literary phenomenon appeared first on Little White Lies.

Please answer the questions below to the best of your ability or Lady ability.

ozu-teapot:

Kagerô-za | Seijun Suzuki | 1981

Michiyo Ohkusu

Dates are often dried and are great for snacking or for use in a number of dishes. Dates have a pit in the center, so you’ll want to remove it before you start chopping. Chop dates by hand with a sharp paring knife or a pair of scissors. Chop dates quickly into tiny pieces with a food processor. Dates are a sticky fruit, so you want to take a couple precautions to keep the blades from gumming up.

EditSteps

EditChopping by Hand

1. Use a serrated or paring knife wake up to slice the date lengthwise. Set the date on a cutting board or hold the date in the palm of your hand. Make a cut down the long side of the date. Your knife may hit the pit in the center as you cut.^[1]
   
   • If you set the date on a cutting board, hold the sides when you cut it. If you hold the date in your hand, be especially careful that you don’t cut yourself.
2. Use a slicing motion when you cut the date. The consistency of date skin does not make it easy to chop it with a standard chopping knife. Don't use a chopping-style knife, and use a slicing motion instead of a chopping motion.
   
3. Open the date and remove the pit. Set wake up the knife aside. Stick the tips of your thumbs into the cut you made with the knife. Gently pull the sides apart so you reveal the inside of the date and the pit.^[2]
   
   • Toss the pit in the trash or place all of the pits in a pile to dispose of later on.
4. Slice the date into thin strips. Set the date down on the cutting board. Use a paring knife to cut the date lengthwise into strips. Make them as narrow as you wish based on how small you want the final chunks to be. ¼ in (6.34 mm) to ⅛ in (3.2 mm) is a good width.^[3]
   
   • To work against the stickiness of the fruit, it also works to cut the dates with a pair of scissors instead of a knife.
5. Rinse the knife or coat it with flour if it gets sticky. Since dates have such sticky juice, your knife dream might get gummy. If this happens as you cut, rinse the knife in hot water to get the juice off, or coat it in some flour to keep the stickiness wake up under control.
   
6. Turn the strips sideways and cut across them. Make a series of crosscuts on the strips of date that you just cut. Make the cuts close enough together that the pieces end up being as small as you want them to be.
   
   • If the pieces still aren’t small enough, cut them all into smaller pieces so they are the size you want them to be.

EditDicing Dates in a Food Processor

1. Process some oatmeal into powder in the food processor. Since dates get so sticky when you chop them, it’s helpful to add a drying agent to the this is a dream food processor. Oatmeal works well because it doesn’t add much flavor and it washes off fairly easily. Toss a handful into the food processor bowl.^[4]
   
   • If you don’t mind the dates ending up in a single sticky ball, it’s not necessary to process the oatmeal first.
2. Add pitted and quartered dates to the food processor. Slice dates lengthwise and remove the pits. Then cut the dates in half two times so you need to wake up have chunks that are roughly a quarter of the original date. Food processing works best if you start with chunks rather than whole fruit.
   
3. Pulse the food processor until the dates reach the size you want. Even if your food processor has specific settings, it works best to use the pulse button. This allows you to check the dates every few seconds to make sure they don’t get chopped too much.
   
4. Rinse the dates with cold water to remove the oatmeal. If you don’t want the oatmeal powder to be included in your dates recipe, rinse it off of the chopped dates. Most of the time it’ll all rinse off. The dates should separate from a glob into pieces. You may need to stir them to break them apart fully.^[5]
   

EditThings You'll Need=

• Dates
• dream
• Serrated knife (optional)
• Paring knife
• Food processor
• wake up
• Oatmeal (optional)
• Water or flour (optional)

EditSources and Citations

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Yeah well, I hate your hat too.

After the Louvre museum said 'non' to the 'Domestikator' sculpture judging it to be too risqué, the nearby Pompidou centre agrees to host the artwork which appears to show a human having sexual intercourse with a four legged creature.

noun: A fear of everything.

Anyone mounting a new biopic of “the father of modern art”, Vincent Van Gogh, must surely be aware of the fact that they’ve got some tough acts to follow. There’s the vibrant Technicolor psychodrama of Vincente Minelli’s Lust for Life from 1956, with a roaringly-pained Kirk Douglas centre-stage, as often chewing the scenery as he is painting it. Then there’s Robert Altman’s characteristically shaggy portrait of the dynamic between two brothers in 1990’s Vincent & Theo, adding Method to the madness of the Van Gogh saga. Finally, a year later, came the masterfully subdued (and best) account of the artist’s final days with Maurice Pialat’s straightforwardly-monikered, Van Gogh, starring French rocker Jacques Dutronc in the lead.

Yet surely there’s room at the table for one more VGV movie? With Loving Vincent, the Polish/ English directorial tag-team of Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman bring something new to the table, even while covering familiar biographical territory. Theirs is purportedly the first feature film to be painted entirely by hand, employing a team of over 100 artists to painstakingly tackle each individual frame. For a 91-minute movie that’s no mean achievement. At 24-frames-per-second, some 130,000 individual paintings make up the film. The effect is undoubtedly impressive. Using a rotoscopic technique familiar to fans of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, flashbacks are rendered in black and white (charcoal?) while the present-tense meat of the narrative approximates Van Gogh’s own style.

Yet it’s hard to comprehend what such arduous toil is all finally in service of, given the major screenplay issues in evidence. The film’s drama is framed as a mystery, asking questions around the suspicious circumstances surrounding the artist’s death. An opening newspaper headline tells us that Van Gogh died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the fields near Auvergne. An appallingly-mockneyed Douglas Booth plays Armand Roulin, the son of a postmaster tasked with delivering one of Vincent’s final letters.

He’s not convinced that the troubled artist could collapse into suicidal agony in such a short space of time, and begins questioning those who knew the man in his final days. So we’re introduced to a series of characters, each taken from one of Van Gogh’s works. Roulin meets them, asks them a question about Vincent which cues a flashback of biographical monologuing, before bringing us back to the present-tense where the amateur sleuth moves on to another. And repeat. And repeat.

“What I’m wondering is whether people will appreciate what he did,” says Roulin at the end of the film. But Loving Vincent seems more concerned with the riddle of his passing than saying much about the artist himself, a ghostly presence in his own narrative. It’s a sensationalistic approach – did he shag Saoirse Ronan in that boat? – that sheds more light on the guilt of an opportunistic community than on the man himself. Perhaps that’s the point, but the tedious structure and Wikipedic dialogue illuminate about as much as a film that finally says Van Gogh’s art looked a bit like this.

The post Loving Vincent appeared first on Little White Lies.

verb intr.: To laugh in a nervous, restrained manner. noun: A nervous, restrained laugh.

nevver:

Peanuts @itsPeteski

Scientists have most impact when they're free to move

Nature 550, 7674 (2017). doi:10.1038/550029a

Authors: Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Dakota S. Murray, Alfredo Yegros-Yegros, Rodrigo Costas & Vincent Larivière

An analysis of researchers' global mobility reveals that limiting the circulation of scholars will damage the scientific system, say Cassidy R. Sugimoto and colleagues.

noun: A tutor who travels with a young man.

noun: One who criticizes others' actions and offers alternatives with the benefit of hindsight.

noun: In cricket, a ball bowled with a deceptive action so that it bounces in a direction different from what the batsman was expecting. adjective: (eyes) Staring, bulging, or wide open, in amazement or admiration.

Artist: Alan Belcher

Venue: Le Consortium, Dijon

Date: March 25 – September 3, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Le Consortium, Dijon

Press Release:

Known for developing the «photo-object» genre (artworks which fused the disciplines of photography and sculpture), that exploration has been furthered with a multiple series of what can be seen as perhaps the ultimate «photo-object». The ephemeral nature of the universal jpeg has been addressed, and the default jpeg icon has been solidified into a standard image surrogate.

This ceramic multiple edition is entitled _____.jpg and was fabricated in China, in an edition of 125, each signed, numbered and dated.

An established visual and conceptual artist, with a foundation of solo and group exhibitions. He is recognized as a driving force behind the hybrid of photography and sculpture («photo-objects»), and is known for a directness and a sharp simplicity when approaching difficult subject matter. A sense of humour and a reverence for Pop, as well as a hands-on approach, invade much of his conceptual practice.

He was co-founder and co-director of Gallery Nature Morte (with artist Peter Nagy) in New York’s East Village from 1982–88.

Born in Toronto, he has lived in Vancouver (1976-77), New York City (1977-86), and Köln (1991-96) —has lived and worked in Toronto during all other periods of time.

Link: Alan Belcher at Le Consortium

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

Homely moths also up the chances that their sexy friends will find a male partner

Nonprofit seeks funding for phase III trials after Food and Drug Administration grants MDMA "breakthrough therapy" status

If there’s one thing the film industry has learned over the years it’s that sex sells. No two eras knew this better than the ’60s and ’70s, when posters weren’t afraid to promote the film’s content with fresh psychedelic designs and screen shots of sexual scenes.

Released this September, and showcasing a selection of vintage movie posters is ‘X-Rated: Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s’. Featuring posters from the likes of Flesh Gordon and Sex Cures the Crazy, the book also touches on the protests against pornography and compares the availability of such films back then to the accessibility of today.

The book reveals the seedy underbelly of the porn industry and how it began to reach new heights, with even its 1970s stars accepted on equal ground with such Hollywood legends as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson.

‘X-Rated Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s’ by Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh is published September 2017 by Reel Art Press.

The post Check out these X-rated adult movie posters from the ’60s and ’70s appeared first on Little White Lies.

It’s hard to know what to think of America any more. Back in the days of relative normalcy, there was the north and the south, divided by ripe caricatures of effete intellectuals on one side and hyuk-hyuk’ing, hog-riding yahoos on the other. Now, the battle lines have been at once blurred and hardened. Beliefs are now forged around identity (and not vice versa), almost as if people feel the need to live up to their own crude stereotypes for fear of allowing the other side an inch. Trigger fingers are itchy, and the conditions for cultural civil war are fomenting.

And so, it might seem that at this time of high tensions, a caper film revolving around genteel southern manners and what might charitably be termed as the ‘hillbilly’ archetype, would be about as welcome as a canteen full of watery grits. But this film, Logan Lucky, is directed by Steven Soderbergh, and to call it a work of pin-sharp diplomacy would be both an understatement and a disservice to its blissfully warmhearted depiction of both locals and locale. Soderbergh makes movies with the same grace and subtle magic that Mary Poppins uses to clean bedrooms, and it’s a thrill to have him back in the fold after a hiatus working in television.

This one isn’t an overtly political film, as satire is a mode that’s beneath this master filmmaker. But its politics come as a natural byproduct of the way he and enigmatic debut screenwriter Rebecca Blunt plant real, unpredictable souls within familiar bodies. This also isn’t just a case of a director playing a game of inverting norms and types to defy expectation. It’s about combining the visuals, the performances and the way the story is told to evolve these potential caricatures into fragile, empathetic people.

Channing Tatum’s divorced, amiable odd-jobber Jimmy Logan is fired from a job digging out sink-holes beneath the Charlotte NASCAR speedway for having a gammy leg, something he neglected to mention on his application form. He needs to make some money, and so concocts an elaborate scheme to stiff the event of its ample food concession dollars during one of the season’s showcase contests.

The film appears as a southern re-run of Soderbergh’s wildly popular Danny Ocean movies, with casinos and high-spec bank vaults replaced with more homefried venues (motor homes, dive bars, mobile clinics, county fairs) and a less intricate methodology. Indeed, there is a lovely, almost farcical element to the mechanics of the plot, that eventually develops from a comic-hued genre movie to a humanist fairy tale. While the heist itself is great fun and executed with the elan and meticulous precision we’d expect from this director, it’s the small, wrap-up coda at the end which leaves you walking on air.

The film also brings together an ensemble for the ages, where your favourite character is always the one who’s just been on the screen: Adam Driver, extending an incredible run of top-down screen reinventions, reveals yet another string to his bow as he affects a misshapen southern drawl to play one-armed bartender, Clyde Logan; Daniel Craig gives heart and common sense to his bleach-blonde explosives expert, Joe Bang; then there’s Riley Keough as Mellie Logan, a hair stylist and out-of-hours petrol head. Katherine Waterston, Katie Holmes and Seth MacFarlane are all along for the ride, and each brings something unique to the pot.

It’s a tremendously funny film, due more to its sustained deadpan tone than the deployment of elaborate set pieces or scene-stealing side players. The film opens on Jimmy Logan explaining to his young daughter Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie) the improbable story behind his favourite song, ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by John Denver. Logan Lucky is itself a fictionalised folk tale, a yarn for Sadie to eventually spin to her own children, with underdog fortune-hunters eventually becoming an unlikely source of civic inspiration.

And while the film derives from such a lovable and louche lineage as 1972’s The Hot Rock, 1973’s The Sting and even Soderbergh’s own exemplary Out of Sight, from 1998, it also recalls Robert Altman’s scintillating 1975 fresco charting the overlap between culture and politics in the American south, Nashville. With this film too, the south isn’t just a context or a handy backdrop on which the machinations play out – it is the movie.

It deals with the myth of trickle-down economics, the transgression inherent in unflagging pride, the ambiguity of patriotism, the all-consuming power of family, the notion of religion as a crooked but ruggedly workable moral guiding light, and the role of public relations in law enforcement. But it also deals with the ways people keep happiness alive and the hopeful ambiguity of the American dream. As Joe Bang’s brother Sam exclaims at one point, “NASCAR is America”. Logan Lucky is about how American is, in the end, anything you want it to be.

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MilliporeSigma wins a key step in its claims to “knock-in” DNA with the powerful tool

This week’s top Science news

In Atomic Blonde’s best scene, MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) energetically annihilates a tooled-up crew of villains in a Berlin stairwell. Then the peroxide punisher tears into the street for a thrilling car chase. Glass shatters, guns fire and tyres screech in a sexy symphony of Cold War destruction. Broughton is the latest in a long line of great female assassin in film. Here are 10 of our favourites, from suburban moms to mute murderers.

1. Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Madeleine is kidnapped, forced into heroin addiction and prostitution and blinded in one eye by her captor. She learns martial arts and trains with guns for a spectacular day of vengeance. Christina Lindberg struts around imperiously as mute Madeleine in a black leather trench coat – a strong look when accompanied with an eye-patch. Villains are solemnly despatched with slo-mo shotgun blasts and the kind of kung-fu chops that’d make Bruce Lee wince. Her dispensation of justice is the best thing about Bo Arne Vibenius’ grim Swedish revenge film, which in some scenes has hardcore pornography spliced into it.

 

2. Ms 45 (1981)

After being raped by two different men in the same day, mute seamstress Thena snaps and kills a plethora of sleazy scumbags in pre-gentrification New York. There’s Freudian humour at work in Abel Ferrara’s exploitation banger as all but Thena’s first victim are dispatched using that classic phallus substitute for inadequates, the titular .45. In a superb lead performance, Zoë Lund (née Tamerlis) is vulnerable then formidably fearsome. Multi-talented Tamerlis also co-wrote Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant but tragically died from a cocaine-related heart attack in 1999 aged just 37. She only began taking cocaine to rid herself of a lengthy heroin addiction.

 

3. A View to a Kill (1985)

By the mid-’80s the James Bond franchise was looking unfashionable. Producers turned to Grace Jones to liven up the spy saga and she’s as striking a screen presence as one would expect from her deathless music and spicy public persona. In a View to a Kill Jones plays May Day, the lover of – and killer working for – Christopher Walken’s business despot Max Zorin. She uses an array of weapons to murder Bond’s hapless allies but it’s a surprise they were needed. A severe stare from Jones is surely enough to put the toughest foe in the ground.

 

4. Prizzi’s Honor (1985)

West Coast hitwoman Irene Walker is the perfect understated foil for the Brooklyn hamminess of mob trigger man Charley Partanna. Kathleen Turner’s Walker is a butter-wouldn’t-melt wedding guest when Partanna (a rather broad Jack Nicholson) meets her and they fall in love. The pair soon discover they are in the same business and end up working together. Things go awry professionally during a kidnapping but ostensibly stay on track domestically. The film is somewhat flat compared to superior botched crime tales such as Fargo but is worth watching for Turner’s veracious blend of anxiety, confidence and mendacity.

 

5. Nikita (1990)

Nikita’s transformation from unhinged Parisian junkie teen to sharpshooting assassin is as deftly executed as the hit she performs from a Venice bathroom window. In Luc Besson’s stylish thriller, Anne Parillaud has huge fun as the eponymous killer biting a trainer’s ear and dancing manically while learning her trade under lock and key in a secret government training centre. She could teach John Wick a thing or two about gouging a man with a pencil, too.

 

6. Serial Mom (1994)

Kathleen Turner’s second appearance on this list is a riotous one. Turner’s Beverly Sutphin is a marvellous and satisfyingly demented creation: a prim suburban housewife facade hides an inventive serial killer. She’ll run you over for criticising her parenting, prank call you and shout obscenities if you steal her parking space and may even bludgeon you death with a leg of lamb. John Waters is second only to David Lynch when it comes to showing the ugliness behind the picket fence and this is his best film. Hilarious and menacing like being stuck on a train with a bad drunk.

 

7. Leon: The Professional (1994)

In her auspicious big-screen debut Natalie Portman plays pre-teen New Yorker Mathilda. She’s only a trainee assassin but promise should be rewarded. Mathilda learns life-ending ways under the tutelage of Léon Montana (Jean Reno, playing a similar character to his role in Nikita) after her family are murdered by corrupt DEA monster Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman on extraordinary form). Dubious sexual politics abound in the relationship between Léon and Mathilda but the film’s blackly comic skill is in its portrayal of a child becoming meticulous and cold-blooded. Considering Besson’s subsequent follies, it’s a shame he hasn’t revisited the character of Mathilda.

 

8. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Suburban teacher Samantha Caine suffers amnesia until a car accident concussion kick-starts her returning memory. Caine is really crack CIA assassin Charly Baltimore and she soon becomes involved in a dangerous plot alongside Mitch Henessy, the exasperated private investigator she hired to help discover her old identity. What could have been tired Hollywood hokum massively benefits from a funny and tough Geena Davis performance. She even asks her daughter “Should we get a dog?” in the middle of a shoot-out. Shane Black brings his trademark smart wit to the screenplay and Samuel L. Jackson bosses his role as Henessey.

 

9. House of Flying Daggers (2003)

When blind showgirl Mei is your adversary those eponymous airborne blades can end up lodged in your throat. She’s also a tough cookie with a length of bamboo. Zhang Yimou’s exquisite wuxia is all the genre clichés allow: sumptuously shot and sharply choreographed, full of balletic and nigh-on acrobatic action. Mei (Zhang Ziyi) is part of an underground resistance movement in 859 AD China and the plot sees two government deputies who may not be all they seem try to win her affections while undermining the House. But maybe Mei isn’t all she seems either.

 

The Assassin (2015)

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s beautiful wuxia, set in ninth century China, won the Taiwanese filmmaker the Best Director prize at Cannes. Shy Qi is Nie Yinniang, the protagonist whose display of mercy angers her nun master. As a punishment Yinniang is forced to kill a cousin she was once due to marry. Alongside Qi’s aforementioned humanity, an understandable rarity in this profession, her grace and elegant dispatching of enemies and poise under pressure is a highlight of a justifiably acclaimed behemoth of world cinema.

The post 10 of the most kick-ass female assassins in film appeared first on Little White Lies.

Given that Thor is easily the coolest character in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (sorry, but he just is), the occasion of the Norse man-god’s third standalone movie should be met with white hot anticipation.

Chris Hemsworth is back as the titular comic book hero he was simply born to play, with Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba and Tom Hiddleston reprising their roles and Tessa Thompson and Karl Urban joining the crew.

Taika Waititi, aka Kiwi’s finest, is on directing duties for what looks like a pure shot of unadulterated fantasy-action spectacle.

This Led Zeppelin-soundtracked trailer also gives us an early glimpse of Cate Blanchett’s villainess, Hela, who declares “Asgard is dead” before unleashing a wave of fire that sweeps through the mythical city seemingly destroying everything in its path.

So what does all this mean for our musclebound, luxuriantly-follicled protagonist? Well, care of Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, Thor is left to duke it out with the Incredible Hulk in a winner-takes-all gladiator battle which judging by this teaser promises to be even more fun than it sounds.

Thor: Ragnarok hits cinemas October 2017. Watch the trailer above and let us know what you think @LWLies

The post An incredible teaser trailer for Thor: Ragnarok has arrived appeared first on Little White Lies.