i’ll be honest i still fan girl over my own mutuals
there are some people on here who, when they followed me back, I got excited about as if they were a celebrity. and when I think about it, it's kinda sweet how we do that here, and so much more special than celebrity crushes. To be starstruck by someone when they're sharing their personal, more private self. You're famous to me for just being you.
Alright, third rewatch of Collateral (2004) and I noticed something EPIC.
So there's writing on the window divider in the cab, right? Something about change. Actual text isn't important. What matters is COLOR and PLACEMENT.
The text behind Max on the right is pretty easy to see, green, big letters. The text in front of Vincent on the left is red and a little smaller.
Here's the thing. In EVERY shot from this direction, where we can see both characters, Vincent is ALWAYS talking from behind the red and Max is ALWAYS talking from in front of the green—except two.
Here, Vincent is coaching Max through telling off his boss. Vincent is pretending to be an attorney and defending Max from having to pay for damages to the cab out of pocket. Notice that Vincent is on the side of the green but not actually touching it; it's important to note that, while he is helping Max here, he's only doing it so the boss will stop poking at them and potentially try to bring them into the station early.
The second scene is far more telling, and, while I couldn't find any screencaps myself, I found gifs of it here on our very own Tumblr.com! Thanks to @illusivesoulgaming for making this one!
In the car on the way from El Rodeo to Fever, which is the penultimate hit and a hugely climactic scene, Vincent does something he hasn't done for the whole film: he sits directly behind Max. His face is partially obscured by those green letters. And he urges Max, in the most sincere and vulnerable fashion we've seen from him, to call Annie after this is all done.
Now, this is WHACK and unbelievably interesting in a lot of ways. First being that, if you've seen this movie before, you know that Annie is the final hit. And you know that Vincent knows this, because he saw her business card in Max's car. So it's pretty easy to interpret this as Vincent twisting the knife, enjoying some private, cruel irony, which will only come to fruition when the night is over.
But personally, I am convinced that this a brief, brief glimpse into Vincent's heart, and what he wants. He wants to lose. He wants to die that night. He wants Max to kill him so that Max can have a happy life. See, this scene comes right after Vincent forces Max to impersonate him in El Rodeo, a very critical moment of growth for Max. He comes out of the club a different man, a more capable man. And he does that by pretending he's Vincent, by stepping into Vincent's shoes. Right after that, just for a second, Vincent does the same thing. He switches to Max's side.
I am convinced that the letter placement and Vincent's position in the car is critical for understanding both scenes. Each time, Vincent is helping Max—the first time it's blatant, to set up the metaphor, but the second one is subtler. Without the first instance and a whole movie of Vincent talking only from behind the red lettering I don't think you can fully make the argument that he's actually wanting what's best for Max in the second scene, but with it, I think it's the best reading. And that's just... some brilliant set design, writing, and cinematography. Wow.
Go watch Collateral, folks. It's really good.
adding onto this post, at the end of the movie, they're shown to switch positions! throughout most of the film, vincent is on the left and max is on the right (in the taxi) but in the very end, after max shoots him (in the train), max is shown to be on the left and vincent is on the right (mirror reflection).
(credits to @bikefuckersoftheworldunite for the gif!)
this also adds to the whole max and vincent being mirrors to each other theory and how the movie incorporates mirrors and reflections throughout. i think op makes a great point about vincent making efforts to help max several times in the movie, and so he's shown to be on the "right" side in those scenes. max literally had to kill vincent to be shown on the opposite side. this was the one line that max had not broken... and by the end, he does that in order to protect annie. he literally becomes vincent by the end.
you'd think that "inhuman thing that isn't a person but speaks like a person and talking to it will slowly drive you mad" would only be found in folktales and fables and so on. but no. chatgpt
chatgpt actually makes me feel better to talk to it than almost any human I've ever known but yeah sure
you are a frog in a pot and you are boiling yourself
Family dream-team Eowyn, Boromir and Faramir. On their way to steal your boy, your girl and your heart.
@oldshrewsburyian surely Éomer would have plenty of charmingly embarrassing stories about his sister? (I don’t remember which of them is older but people can definitely relate anecdotes about older siblings as well, ask me how I know)
Oh he definitely would. And would delight in telling them, as Faramir would delight in listening (I suspect many of them might center on tiny Éowyn chasing her big brother with a wooden sword.) I was perhaps using pronouns badly, but thinking about how there would be no one to perform a similar office in recounting stories about Faramir. I’d be very happy, however, to be convinced that a sympathetic Captain of Guards, or archive-visiting Gandalf, might do some of this in Boromir’s absence which I am still not over.
I just found out VLC media player lets you do this????
It works in motion too!! Took me half an hour asdgfsadfghas
One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they've been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody's going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!
You can just happily much on a plant, thinking "ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp", and it wouldn't cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.
This is sitting on the shelf of human experiences riiiight next to people who don’t realize they’re colorblind.
My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”
Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.
i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn't feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.
yeah... turns out it's NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe
STORY TIME!!!!!!!
My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.
It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.
Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”
No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.
One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age... wait... shit... what do you mean it’s genetic?”
It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are.
They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.
We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.
Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’
I fucking love this family so much.
Beautiful, wonderful story, no notes (except maybe asking if there's room for one more at the dinner table).
Anyway, back to the original post, I am in deep gratitude for it, because it's the only reason I thought to wonder if chickpeas are supposed to be spicy.
(Hint: Apparently they're not. The genetic lottery locked the good tasting falafel and hummas behind an allergy wall.)
....what,,, what is aloe vera supposed to feel like?????
It's supposed to feel cool and soothing.
need me a t-shirt that says “THE TOOKS SHOT FIRST”
Tom Cotton: So there are Men all over the Shire, menacing people, locking them up, tearing down trees and good hobbit holes…all through Hobbiton, Bywater, Buckland…
Pippin: What about Tuckborough?
Cotton: Your father initiated guerrilla warfare and they’ve been at a military impasse for months.
Pippin: I love my family so fucking much.
it’s just, you spend much of The Hobbit and parts of Lord of the Rings with the narration periodically being like, “and then his Tookish heritage reared up and said, “don’t you want to just go feral?” But it’s narration, background. We’ve never met Belladonna Baggins née Took and we never do. Pippin repeatedly follows his friends into inane danger despite being repeatedly told not to, or sometimes just goes by himself, but so do Merry, Sam, and Frodo, and hey, Pippin’s the hobbit equivalent of 17. Maybe it’s just Pippin.
And then you get to the Scouring of the Shire and it’s like, oh. Oh no. They’re all Like That.
One pool floatie to rule them all