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.
One of the most toxic pieces of writing “advice” I have ever gotten, bar none, is “real writers write every day!”
And yet I see it touted constantly by writers and those who support writers, often bringing up the example of “Steven King writes 8 hours every day!”
Here’s my counter-advice to anyone and everyone who has heard this “real writers write every day” crap.
It’s a lie. It’s an absolute, outright lie, to say someone can write every single day without fail. Even the people who do it professionally take breaks. Even the people whose entire livelihoods are based on the written word will take time out and just relax. And that’s not even bringing up writer’s block or anything similar to it, or just feeling like you don’t want to write today.
That’s all okay. I’ve spent weeks not writing before getting back to it, I’ve dropped projects and started them months later under new names, I’ve done all manner of things that so flagrantly fly in the face of the statement “real writers write every day” that frankly, for a long time, I started to think I wasn’t a real writer.
But that’s bullshit. You can take a break for any reason. Depression, work, illness, and and so forth may actively stop you from writing. You could spend time with your loved ones, or playing video games, or cuddling a dog, or going out to a bar, and choose to not write. That doesn’t make you a fake writer, it just makes you a human.
“Real writers write every day” is, and always will be, a lie. Don’t fall for it.
A writer has to write, yes, and often too. But there is no universal law that you have to do it every day. There is more to life than staring at words on a screen. As Daniel Jose Older has said:
“Writing begins with forgiveness. Let go of the shame about how long it’s been since you last wrote, the clenching fear that you’re not a good enough writer, the doubts over whether or not you can get it done. Sure, the nagging demons will come creeping back, but set them aside anyway, and then set them aside again when they do.”
‘You must write everyday to be a writer,’ is up there with ‘you have to read everything in order to be a good writer,’ on my list of bogus writing advice.
Some writers do write everyday, but that’s only because that’s the method that works for them. It’s called the “No Zero Days” or “Don’t Break The Chain” method of building up habits and inertia. Saying that somebody is only a real writer if they do that is completely missing the message in the method. Find a system that works for you, and fuck anybody who tells you otherwise.
Having said that, if you find a subject, story, or idea that inspires / enrages you so much that you DO end up writing every day, good for you!
I always found that advice really discouraging until I realized it was bullshit. It can be good to push myself to write regularly for a limited span of time. (Two weeks maximum tbh.)
But BURNOUT IS A THING. I think there are people out there who do well writing every day. The rest of us would just start to hate writing, because not many people can keep enjoying something or giving it their all if they make themselves do it every. Friggin’. Day.
Sometimes I’ve even forced myself to take a break from writing so I can have a chance to crave the experience of writing. That craving can be super inspiring (Nowadays I’m so busy that life imposes those breaks against my will.)
Random side note: I also used to write with word count goals, and that was really useful for a while. But at some point I discovered that if I shift gears to outlining in the gaps when I have writer’s block, that turns back into writing pretty organically. Then I didn’t need to push myself much to write.
After that, word count quotas kinda’ became a logistically nightmarish solution to a problem I no longer had. There are other types of discipline that can be useful if I have time for them: Getting to a certain point in the story, sitting down to write for a set amount of time, doing warm-up writing exercises, or completing the next scene/chapter for my beta readers.
“I want to be a hematologist. That’s a blood doctor. Well not a blood doctor, exactly. But a doctor that finds cures for blood diseases.” “How’d you decide on that?” “We were dissecting frogs in class and learning about how the blood flows through the body. And I went home that night and wrote an essay. And it wasn’t like any other essay I’d ever done. Normally when I write essays, it takes me a long time, but this was the fastest essay I ever wrote. So the next day I was asking the teacher mad questions, and she was like, ‘You know you can get a job in this.’ And she pulled it up on the internet, and was showing me all about hematologists.”
SUPPORT THIS BOY
I love it when someone gets that thunderbolt “I wanna do this forever” moment. It’s amazing to see that change in them once they’ve got an actual concrete dream to work towards.
Death By Catchphrase 