I want an inverse spy flick. The spy is a woman. Her whole team is made up of diverse women. All the villains are women. There is only one man in the entire movie and he is a Strong Male Character who is like 25 and decently ripped and has a scene where he slowly steps out of a pool wearing speedos because he is Confident and In Control of His Sexuality. We see his ass when he has to tug down his pants to get at the knife strapped to his thigh. His nipples are always erect for no fucking reason.
They are undercover in a nightclub. In order to keep their cover from being blown, he has to kiss another man.
He knits to relieve stress and to keep his mind sharp. It is never discussed by any of the characters.
Someone asks him how he knows how to do Traditionally Feminine Thing. “I have four sisters,” he answers.
This is also how he knows how to fight while armed with nothing but a purse, a high heel shoe, and a can of hair spray. During this fight, he is, for no apparent reason, shirtless.
The lead spy is Helen Mirren. She nails the Action Boy in the shower. There’s a lot of lingering closeups on the way the shower spray runs across his breathlessly ecstatic face. We also hear every breathless whimper of his climax, while out in the hallway Lucy Liu is smoking impatiently, a duffel bag full of rocket launchers slung over her shoulder. The President isn’t going to kidnap herself, here, christ.
Action Boy emerges in a small towel, sheepish yet radiant. Helen Mirren emerges in a tuxedo, also smoking, also with a duffel bag of rocket launchers.
In one scene, the lead villain captures the Strong Male Character. He is, once more, inexplicably shirtless as she ties him to the chair. He makes some quips about his sexual independence before he is rescued by a sweat-drenched Helen Mirren, who kicks down the door and nukes everyone in the room. Strong Male Character’s hair remains perfect throughout the ordeal.
Strong Male Character is heartlessly slain in front of Helen Mirren’s eyes despite all of his skills and combat prowess. His body slumps to the ground, lifeless but supple. Helen Mirren makes a witty quip at Strong Male Character’s killers before quickly and dramatically slaying them all.
She steals one last glance at Strong Male Character. His beautiful eyes stare back from a handsome face with perfectly tussled hair, lips positioned a if in a gentle sigh. There’s no bringing him back now. Helen Mirren walks away, stronger than before. Strong Male Character’s death has hardened her, but given her the strength and resolve to complete her task.
Roll credits.
An after credits preview clip comes on as a teaser. Helen Mirren with a huge explosion tearing things up behind her walks toward the camera with a new Strong Male Character wearing the tiny, tattered remnants of a burned shirt about his flexing pecs and deltoids, and he is carrying the bag of rocket launchers as he steps in behind her.
So Matt Bomer?
I’m seeing Matt Bomer
and then fandom burns itself to the ground trying to find some guy to slash him with
Nah, Matt Bomer is almost 40. Despite his good looks and great bod, he’s way too old to play the shaggable romantic supporting character to 70-year-old Helen Mirren.
Matt Bomer plays Helen Mirren’s sadder-but-wiser ex, computer-savvy, gorgeous but still single, fiercely independent (but it’s all an act).
Helen Mirren shows up on his doorstep to ask him for one last hacker job, for old time’s sake. Matt hauls off to slap Helen in the face, but Helen catches his wrist, pulls him close, and kisses him long and hard. Matt struggles at first but finally melts into her embrace.
Lucy Liu strolls past them into Matt’s chic apartment, slapping Matt on the ass as she mutters “Some things never change, do they?”
Late the next night, as Matt and Helen hack into the CIA database, Helen tucks a stray lock of Matt’s hair behind his ear and asks him why there’s no husband or kids in the picture after all this time.
Matt turns his sad, beautiful eyes toward her and confesses that there has only ever been Helen for him, but he couldn’t stand never knowing if she would come back alive when she left on a mission. Helen and Matt nearly have a moment, but the computer beeps with the results of their search.
The next morning, Helen goes into the kitchen to find Matt’s 20-year-old nephew has come to stay for the weekend. Helen and the camera slowly pan up and down his gorgeous, toned, oiled-up and glistening body as he stands, nearly-naked but for his tight, black satin booty-short underwear, and starts making a gourmet vegetarian omelet.
He turns around and smiles at Helen. “You must be a friend of Uncle Matt. I’m Caden. You hungry?”
Helen’s eyes drift down to Caden’s bulging crotch. “Oh, I could eat,” she quips.
Helen Mirren and the actor who plays the 20 year old nephew get together in real life. Everyone is delighted by this.
I don’t think financing this would be a problem; distribution probably would. We could hack into the network feed for the Super Bowl, perhaps.
so. i think there’s a good chance this was a joke. i lost my mind laughing when i first got it. but also? this is exactly how men talk, so i’m gonna break it down seriously.
i made that post after dinner with my friend’s family. his dad, let’s call him john, was belittling his wife so she wasn’t talking much and he’d made a few jabs about his son’s painted nails so his son was kind of wilting. john’s a nice guy, smart guy, really likes me & thinks i’m smart. i was pretty much carrying all the emotional labor at that dinner–trying to make my friend and his mom feel comfortable while also engaging with john. we were making conversation about lots of things, it wasn’t a particularly controversial or heated discussion at really any point in time. again, john’s a cool guy–he’s liberal and progressive and knows that i’m a lesbian and all sorts of nice things. he works for a bigggg banking company–i don’t wanna say which one, but you’d know the name. we were talking about #metoo and he starts talking about how sexual harassment isn’t really an issue where he works.
three hours before he said this, a man in times square had grabbed my boob. at a restaurant i worked at, a rapist who worked there got my number off the scheduling app and would text me vile things while we were both working to make me uncomfortable. he’d also touch my ass every shift but always managed to pretend like it was an accident. it wasn’t. my best friend, who was also at dinner with us, worked at her moms law firm when she was 17, and the man across from her had a countdown on his whiteboard to the day she turned 18 and every day he would look at her as he changed the number. i’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times outside of these instances, and so has she.
but other men don’t see these things.
and this man looks at me, and tells me sexual harassment doesn’t happen, because he doesn’t see it. and here’s the thing: that’s not why i’m mad. i’m not mad because he didn’t know.
i’m mad because i know this man. he is my friend’s father, he is my father, he is my uncles, he is my professors, he is my cousins, and my bosses, and my colleagues. i know how you have to talk to these men. it’s a game. and you have to play along whether you want to or not, because they won’t hear a word you say if you don’t.
here’s how the game works: john talks about everything like he’s the authority on the matter, because he can’t get it through his brain that someone, especially someone who is not a man, could possibly know something he doesn’t. so john starts talking about things very confidently. and because nobody knows everything, he gets a lot of things wrong. things that i refuse to let him be wrong about. so if i want to change john’s mind, if i want him to hear my point of view, i have to speak to him in the only way he will listen. i have to be, above all, pleasant. john has been taught for years to laugh at a woman’s anger, so if any hint of indignation sneaks into my voice, he won’t take me seriously any more and i’ll lose him entirely. i have to smile and laugh a little and be charming. but i also have to be articulate. i have to make sure i sound intelligent or else he’ll dismiss me as a stupid teenage girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. but i also can’t sound too intelligent because if he starts feeling threatened by my intelligence he’ll get defensive. (sidenote! he has a tiny dick.) so it’s quite a complicated game but i’m good at it. in fact, i’m one of the best. so here i am, carefully navigating the best way to hold this man’s hand and babysit him as i give him a kindergarten level course on sexual assault in the workplace, while also not letting him realize that i’m having to condescend to him because his brain is as tiny as his dick, and can only handful little bits of new information spoonfed to him like applesauce. i have to make it sound like i think he is not only smart, but smarter than me. i have to scatter in little phrases like, “in my experience” or “i could be wrong” and constantly undermine myself, even when speaking on a topic i am incredibly well-versed in, because i have to suggest that i think he is smarter than me or else he won’t deem me worthy of his attention.
i’m good at it. i play the little fucking game and before i know it, i’ve got john here nodding along and acting like he agreed with what i’m saying all along, acting like he came up with it, acting like he DIDN’T totally contradict what i just told him minutes before. but since he didn’t come up with it, he’ll likely interrupt me before i even get to the end of my point and say something totally misinformed and now i’m trying to educate him on both of the things he got wrong but before i can even do that he’s interrupting me again and now there’s THREE things i’ve gotta teach this guy without him catching on to the fact that i’m teaching him.
now. here’s the best part about the game. it’s soul-shatteringly dehumanizing. to disregard your own trauma, your own emotion, your own incredibly valid anger that you have fought and fought and fought to believe you have a right to feel, to tone down your beliefs in order to make them more palatable to someone who is this deeply ignorant, to force yourself to giggle and be charming as you discuss the thing that has ripped you into shreds, to ignore how triggering it is to even breach this topic in conversation, to be complicit in making yourself small in order to get your point across, to look into the eyes of a man who has, unwittingly, because of his ignorance, enabled other men to engage in this same behavior–it turns a dinner conversation into a thing that is traumatizing in it’s own right.
and i feel obligated to put myself through this because of my privilege, because as an attractive, white twenty year old, i can hold this man’s attention better than a massive portion of the population, who he likely wouldn’t give the time of day to. i refuse to let him live his life unchallenged, so i do what i have to do to make myself heard.
and i feel the repercussions of this so strongly i dissociate more viciously than i have in weeks and lose all memory of a solid 3 hours of my life after this conversation.
and i come on here, and post: men are useless and exhausting. because i am angry at what men have done to me. at what they continue to do to me. at what i must do to myself in order to force them to wake up and realize what other men are doing to me and to please, for the love of god, MAKE IT STOP.
and i get this message from you, a dumbass who’s got his head shoved so far up his own asshole that it’s about to come back up through his esophagus, assuming you know what i’m talking about. assuming you know more than me about men and about my experiences with them, about why i made this post. assuming that because you’re not the scum of the fucking earth and because you do three good things, it somehow balances out the treatment i have received for years from men, and makes my anger towards them, and my hatred of them: unjust. and my post wasn’t even me being angry! it was me being exhausted!!!!! if i’m tired of men, why the fuck would you, “a male” deem it at all appropriate to come near me, to send me a message, to engage with me at all? leave me alone! you know nothing!
and as much as i thought this was a joke at first, the more i read the message the more i’m convinced that it was written by a man, because even a girl pretending to be a man as a joke wouldn’t manage to sound this fucking stupid. i have dozens of stories exactly like this over the course of at least 10 years of my life. i know more than you. and this isn’t FUCKING about you. if you weren’t useless and exhausting, you would have happily scrolled by and went on with your night. but by sending me this message you proved yourself to be IMPRESSIVELY: useless and exhausting. shut the fuck up for about 3-4 years. you might learn something. also, read men explain things to me by rebecca solnit. she says all this better than i do.
Ooh man. I think it’s possible for them to stare at each other for a good five minutes before speaking. If they touched they’d probably create a rift in the time space continuum
But besides that real Octavius would probably wonder why this smol version of him is as different as he is. I don’t know a great deal about Augustus (for those of you who don’t know, real Octavius after he changed his name) but I feel like generally they’d get along! I feel like both of them are very smart and great commanders, plus also being savage bois. And y’know what? I imagine Tavi might want to impress Augustus but find it very hard because. Two inches tall. Lil army of maybe ~500-800 soldiers? Could probably kill an untrained night guard but that’s it… Versus Augustus being a literal fucking Emperor and Tavi’s sad because he wants to be the way his historical counterpart was, and oh no angst…
anyone with knowledge of the OG Roman boi pls feel free to add on
Hmmm… I could add something after school today :3
Sooo.. now that I’m home, made my homework, and put out my beloved Latin book since I learned it, but still could get some things mixed up, I can finally make my addition. It will be just some infos, since I agree with you – but maybe you’d like to read those things 😀
I would actually call him Augustus “Fuck-The-Rules” because that’s what he did pretty much. It just started with the first thing that comes into my mind – Caesar only made him his adoptive son in his testament, but he was completely sure that he wanted to go into that political business to build up on what he had already. With 18!
He also didn’t care about the pressure he could get. This person is popular and has a lot of influence, but were against Caesar? Fuck their influence, kill them!
Augustus played the senate and the whole population, learning from Caesar’s mistakes and actually dancing on a thin line. He wanted the full power, so he fought against Marc Anton, who helped him win against the republicans, and he won that fight, too.
And, like I said, he definitely did things that broke the law, and didn’t give a damn about that. If people pointed out that he broke the law, he would say that it was to guide the Romans into freedom again.
He was really good at his work – he built up a good base for the rulers that would come after him.
I also think that they would come along, since they share their qualities, they’re smart as fuck, savage and good at commanding. I guess that Augustus still would think that Tavi’s too nice/gentle – what I read was him being brutal, too. Around 2300 people were killed because of him, 300 senators and 2000 knights that were against Caesar. I don’t think that Tavi would do such things, even if he could – I just don’t see him like that. Also, Augustus seemed a bit more strict and tensed – what’s no wonder, since he had to get Rome under control after Caesar was killed – and I can only imagine that this was a really exhausting thing, haha
But I’m pretty sure that Augustus would learn to appreciate our little boi for being a smart, brave and in his own kind savage commander. Especially when I think of some acts of kindness and calmness that he did, even if he almost always had a political background for it. He wasn’t mad brutal – just enough to reach his goal. And he’ll also find this ambitiousness in Tavi.
I hope you enjoyed my addition lol
A very interesting read. Thank you!
Thanks for this enlightening addition! I love it!!!
Yes, I feel like Tavi is savage in his own special way (He’s more subtle with his sassiness, except in the case of “It’s Octavius, Mary” lmao) and I can easily see him laying down the Facts whenever someone is blatantly disrespectful. And I feel that Tavi is much more open with how he feels than Augustus was. But that’s just me :3
I agree. Octavius in NatM is very straightforward with his feelings. (And so is Jed.) I had the impression that they’re acting very childish because of that. But admitting how you feel is actually very brave. And they do that throughout the movies.
First: I’m so glad that you liked my addition! Roman history really is one of my favourite history lessons topic. Even if I had to learn everything again because my teacher wasn’t good – she just made us learn anything without talking about. You forget things quickly when you learn like that. But I relearned some of this history xD
Anyways, I agree with you. Since I have Latin, and that’s been a little more than two years now, in every text about him, he didn’t really express any feels, except two things: He was ambitious, and really proud when he had what he had. He was a really calm/controlled but sassy emperor, what’s rare, at least at my knowledge. I mean… if you read some things about Roman emperors…
(actually a pretty good rolemodel if you see it like that)
Tavi is way more open about his feelings, that’s true. And I also agree with you that he’s more subtle with his sassiness! But he has it, and that’s one point they both have :3
Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”
If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.
Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)
Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.
From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.
Also, just don’t fucking be assholes about how much people eat, even if they seem to eat a lot. It’s not your goddamn business.
Death By Catchphrase 