riding the echo down

i completely unintentionally backdated my most recent post, lol, because i never changed the date from when i first started composing it. so yeah if you're curious about some of the behind-the-scenes stories/viewpoints of people involved in the production of rituals (1977) i shared some interviews! don't worry, i haven't forgotten about making a post for the seal-clubbing comedy. it's happening, though i did conveniently become sidetracked by a short film mai zetterling directed that stars lawrence dane - i'll save the details for an individual post, but i captioned the whole thing mostly by myself and that sure was a little journey.

i've joined a discord server of david gale fans, and it's been...interesting, since i'm the oldest person there by far lmao. i'm not getting too involved though - just hanging out there for the archival work being spearheaded by this one fan who runs the davidgalearchive account on tumblr. they also have a dedicated youtube account that i've been meaning to trawl though, and it's made me wonder if i should do the same for my dane video clips. i don't have as much that needs public archiving, i think....

idk what it is about me that swings between craving internet interactions versus retreating from almost everything sometimes, but i'm looking forward to my upcoming time off as a mental reset button.

i'm also looking forward to seeing a story of mine in print! again, technically, but the last time i went through a formal submission process was in 2015 so.... after about two weeks of revising and editing at a breakneck speed i think the editors and i have arrived at a version that's ready to release into the world. it'll be in the january issue of OFIC magazine and i'm excited to introduce more people to my fucked-up horrible little priest man. who is over six feet tall but y'know. he's doing his best, ok? (and someday i'll finish the high school teacher au story i've been picking away at with the intention of getting it published....) i'm planning on writing more about the whole experience with OFIC after i have the physical thing in my hands, so if you have any specific questions you want me to address in that post just drop them in the comments here.

the "is this worth watching for lawrence dane" rating: 3/5

the plot is pretty straightforward: he plays a lawyer for a mobster that the group are trying to take down and the group decides to exploit the lawyer's resentful wife as a weak link by forcing her into rehab and impersonating her.

there's no cold war wackiness in this one (meaning the obligatory xenophobia is also lacking, though there is one very strange racist exchange during one of the therapy scenes) but there's plenty of other absurdities that make this fun to watch - magical rubber masks, for example, and truly bizarre cutting-edge 1970s "group therapy" sessions - and the main actress, elizabeth ashley, who you might recognize from her later role in the nic cage feature vampire's kiss, gives us just the right amount of melodrama called for by the premise. honestly she carries this episode by playing dane's alcoholic wife - dane does a solid job, and his approach to method acting really shows in some places, but he's a bit hamstrung by the vague accent he's putting on. generic "american tough guy", i think, and it's not usually distracting but there's a couple scenes where it doesn't do his delivery any favors. shame, because dane really has what it takes to play sympathetic bad guys/antagonists. so this doesn't rate as highly as his commandante episode but he gets to do much more here than just looking cute in the survivors, and the stuff with ashley's character is compelling enough to make sitting through the other dane-less scenes worth it. unfortunately (or fortunately) dane isn't in any of the therapy scenes.

it probably is worth warning for domestic violence, however - there's one scene where he slaps her without any warning and both of them do a great job with it but that might make it harder to watch for some. and then she's forcibly manhandled by a few different people, sometimes for restraint or forced institutionalization and sometimes as part of the really strange therapy sessions lol, and there's a scene or two where she throws and breaks things.

yeah yeah i called dane's character sympathetic but he's a wifebeater, cancel me, etc. my policy is generally "if someone lays hands on you irl then leave them asap" but in fiction it can be a little different. what i mean is that you can see the conflict in his eyes and dane sells him as someone who was a good husband, once, but the narrative has decided he's irredeemable. this makes the ending more upsetting to me than i think they intended, honestly, because yeah he dies (not really a spoiler with his track record let's be real) and she has no idea, she's just being forced back into rehab when he gets murdered and the mission impossible crew doesn't seem to really be thinking about her psychological welfare at all. what kind of support is she going to have when she gets out? could he have been a good husband again, if they'd been able to escape the mob he'd gotten involved with? we're not asked to consider that at all but i really feel as though dane plays him as though he had the potential. how much of that is his performance and how much is me just being biased because it's dane, idk, but it makes the story of this more interesting than a lot of mission impossible episodes (imo).


highlight: going through these caps made me realize he has a scar on the right side of his upper lip, almost like my oc....

i'm not positive whether it's REALLY good makeup or an actual scar - it's hard to tell if he had it in the 1967 episode since that one's pretty dark. a damn shame the film quality for rituals is what it is because i could compare some of those lovely closeups.... i didn't adjust the color/light on this or any of the following screencaps btw


( 'she's muh WAHFE' and he's my wife. mwah )

if i had to rank his three mission impossible episodes in terms of rewatchability, i think it'd go commandante, the survivors, then this one. not because his performance is lesser (in the survivors he's mostly standing around being adorable lol) but because it's a little hard to watch just for fun. granted, the imperialist gaslighting in commandante is also a boner kill, but he's having so much fun with the role it's easier to ignore the upsetting aspects of that episode. that said, if you chose to watch only two i'd insist you skip the survivors and watch this one along with commandante. you get to see him do way more here and regardless of whether you think he does a good job or not the rest of the episode is quite the experience.

i just wanted to try out this feature since i don't remember anything really like it when i was on livejournal. (a quick internet search shows an lj news post from summer of 2009, so it had barely been rolled out before i stopped using the site lol.) it's okay if nobody votes since i'm mostly just tickled by the novelty of this and want to see what it looks like on my page, but without any other input i'll probably go with whatever i watched earliest and haven't posted about yet. not saying which that is so you can vote with your hearts uwu


(fwiw, the last two are combined because he's only in the last 30 minutes of the first comedy. find the lady features him in a leading role as the same character from the first)

if you're genuinely interested but would prefer to nominate something else i've watched from the masterpost just drop a comment below.

and i'm bored during an online work meeting so here you go.

i don't remember how i came across this review for rituals but this person thinks that harry and mitzi knew each other since childhood. that doesn't seem right to me - hal holbrook was more than 10 years older than dane, and in the film harry seems to be the only one with any war experience and i think based on the age of the others they were too young for the korean war (obviously) or in school when the vietnam war was happening. canada didn't send troops to vietnam so the draft thing doesn't apply, but still.

the childhood misconception seems to be based on the scene(s) where harry and mitzi talk about their fathers, but it's not far-fetched to me at all that a group of middle-aged friends who went to college together would be aware of each other's families. i already gave their pre-film relationships a fair amount of thought for the fic so let me just lay some of that out here since i said i'd talk about the research background of my fic eventually anyway.

( charlie day pepe silvia moment )

i want to write another fic for these guys eventually, so having a timeline is helpful for me even if it's not a granular one. thinking about crack crossovers helps me flesh things out a little more, and also it's just fun! all these doctors with dubious ethics.... let's put them through hell, lol. but herbert west clearly has no interest in learning from any of his mistakes, lmao, while mitzi's instinct seems to be more along the lines of cutting his losses and running. relentless pursuit versus self-defensive flight.... it's a dynamic i revisit a lot in fiction and for good reason.

anyway, ian sutherland really did a great job sketching out the characters and their relationships so i think if a person misunderstands something about the character dynamics they weren't paying enough attention, or jumped to a conclusion and didn't let later interactions change their understanding. and i'm not just saying that because i've watched it several times, i promise XD it's been a few months now since the last time i saw it, see, i can be normal about it! and besides i have to work on some other fics this weekend (ao3 exchange/zine deadlines) so a rituals rewatch will just have to wait.

*eta 12/1/22: gammell would have been around 40 or 41 when the movie was actually being filmed, since he's a few months older than dane (sept 1936 vs april 1937), but i feel like it's still reasonable to use the actors' ages for the other characters since we don't have anything else to go on. and also i don't think it makes a huge impact on my fic whether marty is older or younger than mitzi - they're very close in age and that's the main thing, imo.

so i was poking around, as you do, and noticed that dane's wikipedia entry had a new citation. turns out someone clipped this interview from 1960 and generously made it public for all. i've re-uploaded it so there should be no questions about access.

i'm fascinated by his choice to switch from larry or lawrence zahab to lawrence dane (though by all accounts he still went by larry in non-professional settings) - most likely it was for a depressing pedestrian reason such as not wanting to sound too "ethnic" but i do wonder why dane of all names. sure, it sounds great, but where did that come from? i haven't located his answer to this question yet, but that's all right for now. he's zahab in the interview and he's adorable. he looks like a baby compared to how i know him best and he's only 22! when i was 22 i was wrapping up college (finished a year later than "normal" because i finished high school a year late due to a stint in hospital) and it doesn't seem like he went to college. it's both interesting and sobering to think about how much things have changed between now and then with regards to expectations around a college education. now you can barely do anything without a BA, but when he was a young man you could get by on experience alone. lots of people have remarked on this before in more eloquent ways so i won't get too deep into it, especially because you don't exactly need a rigorous higher education to become a fine actor.

the interview is so fun to read and there's quotes in there that show he was passionate about the state of canadian theatre and film his entire life, which i find very endearing. especially the part where he just whips out cash for a membership upon being told there was a fundraising effort for a professional theater in his home town of ottowa... baby.....

it also mentions that he played football, which i was quite surprised by for reasons unknown even to myself. i guess i don't usually think of actors as being athletes? or manual laborers, another thing the interview says he did for a while before really committing to acting. very grateful he made enough progress with his career to leave that behind. but i was intrigued by the football mention, especially since it named both teams he played for, and after some basic sleuthing i found a whole webpage dedicated to the canadian junior football league. i've linked directly to the page about the short-lived league specific to ottowa, but if you have an interest in football in general the rest of the blog seems worth perusing.

i want to highlight the two photos i found of him on that page; they're not nearly as clear as the adorable one in the 1960 interview, of course, but they're still very obviously him.




in this one he's number 48, if you needed the assistance; he's credited as zahab here, of course, and the same goes for the following image where he's number 50. he doesn't have the same wide grin but in a way that makes him more easily identifiable since you can really see his bone structure.





(idk why op separated the image from the text for this second photo but if/when i re-upload these to my personal website i'll join them up again. considering i was heavily inspired by cody nelson as a young fujin it stands to reason i should dedicate a section of my personal website to dane the same way nelson has space dedicated to a favorite actor of theirs. Anyway,)

i don't remember enough about amefuto from eyeshield 21 to speak to what the jersey numbers mean, though the 1960 interview says he played tackle for both teams. i also don't know enough about the culture of switching teams year to year.... the first one was from 1954 while the second is from 1955, meaning he would have been around 18 depending on when the west end cobras photo was taken (he was born in 1937). thinking about him being 18 makes me go insane so i won't dwell on it, though if the 1960 photo is anything to go by he was absolutely a little heartthrob. no wonder he had a reputation for being a playboy in 1976. okay i say little but you can clearly see how much taller he is than the other guys and the 1960 interview acknowledges this by noting how he's over six feet tall.

that brings me to something else i wanted to remark on: when describing him, the 1960 profiler makes a very strange comment. grantham says that "Virile roles suit [Dane] well" and then goes on to make this even weirder remark: "He can simulate a variety of racial types, too - North American Indian, Italian, Middle Eastern, Pakistani, as well as just Canadian." leaving aside the blisteringly obvious racism of using "canadian" as shorthand for "white", surely this local person knew he was from a lebanese family..... but, well, even decades later people could mistake him for italian lol. goes to show how race is fake and/or how the western concept of race vs ethnicity has been thoroughly fucked up, i guess.

anyway, i think it's extremely sexy of a cis man to describe another cis man as virile, regardless of whatever was intended by that. thank you for your service, ronald grantham! i'm also glad to have the description of his family situation because i was able to poke around and discovered that his father died very suddenly in 1954. the obituary mentions a brother that isn't named in the 1960 profile and idk what was going on with phillip. something for me to research another time! [2023 eta: philip/phillip died in 1957, which would be why he's not mentioned in 1960.] i can't imagine what it'd be like to have a parent die when you're not even 17 yet (dane's birthday was in april and his father died in january) but i don't know what his relationship with his father was like. he'd be from a generation where paternal intimacy wasn't really a thing, broadly speaking, and where men being vulnerable was generally frowned upon. even in the 1976 macleans profile it's other people who describe him as being emotionally vulnerable at all - he doesn't address it himself.

by all accounts he did all right for himself in his personal life, making and keeping friends and all that, and an interview in rue morgue magazine issue 96 makes it clear that he knew his passion project (rituals) had a dedicated fanbase. i'll talk about that interview soon - it's really very sweet and confirms a lot of things i'd been making educated guesses about. there's even more media out there i'm trying to get ahold of, but the 1960 profile is a wonderful find since it makes for a lovely bookend of sorts with the rue morgue interview.

this was a bit of a ramble but thanks for sticking it out if you made it to the end. and as always, let me know if you have any thoughts or questions.

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 0.5/5

ok, admittedly i'm prejudiced since i've so far only been able to locate this on DVD and it has no closed captions, so i had no clue what they were saying and barely any idea of the plot beyond "middle eastern terrorists kidnap an oil company ceo but plot twist the ceo was working with them the whole time and then they murder him in literally the last five minutes and i have no idea if they ever explained why he was working with them", lol. the lead actors are very wooden, the pacing was strange, and i couldn't tell the blonde women apart lmao. judging by this person's review of the TV pilot/movie i'm not missing much by not being able to follow the dialogue.

but! dane is very cute, of course, since i'm of the opinion that he was most attractive during these years. it's... not his best performance, especially not his unfortunate introduction where his character is roofied and passes out - he hits his head on his dropped cup and i don't think that was intentional but the project was low-budget enough they had to keep the take, lol. i hope he was ok! or maybe it was supposed to be funny, since the "our man flint" films are supposed to be james bond spoofs....? it's not set up well enough to play as comedy, however, and i don't think there's a cultural disconnect here since there's definitely comedies from the '70s that hold up today. it just comes down to execution. he's not a bad comic actor when the material is decent, though i do think he does better with more nuanced or serious characters, so the fault here seems to fall pretty squarely on the director and/or scriptwriter.

speaking of execution.... yeah, i have no idea why he dies in this but it's not shocking since he dies in most of his filmography :') he does take an arrow to the knee, or close enough, and again i'm not sure that was supposed to be funny but i burst out laughing because without knowing the dialogue it's completely inexplicable and the pacing of the scene sure feels like something that'd fit better in a comedy.

i'm reluctant to assign this a zero because maybe the dialogue makes it a more amusing experience, since i imagine it's probably bad, and the cheesiness of it can be mildly entertaining. i've uploaded a video of just his scenes that you can view here (and i will grudgingly give thanks for the autocaptions youtube generated), and the usual screenshots are below. i haven't edited any of them.



i'm planning on making other videos to compile his scenes in things not really worth watching otherwise. i was already working on one for the national lampoon movie but the program i was trying to use was not terribly cooperative. but i found out about clip champ and so far it reminds me a lot of imovie when i had to use a macbook during undergrad. i really liked imovie since it was easy to use for fanvids, so if clip champ keeps working well i might start making those again.

man. a lot of things have happened since the last time i was able to log in here. my spouse got top surgery (yay!) so i had to take off work and be their caretaker, which has been both good and bad. bad because i'm terrible at being a caretaker/house spouse lmao (i managed, tho, they're still alive) and good because i REALLY needed a break from work. i've been so stressed with covid and everything and then right before my spouse's surgery some people got it in their mind to harass me because i dared advertise an anthology i co-edited for a ship they didn't like. it's not my fault that student/teacher can be very sexy, and there wasn't anything in the anthology that would be illegal most places anyway. really feels like ye olde ship war just dressed up in weird holier-than-thou rhetoric. so i've been laying pretty low and staying off most social media, which has been very good for me mentally.

i've been participating in an oc exchange event (not artfight, it was formed as a response to harassment the artist skumsuck received at the hands of artfight mods) and doing a lot of little ficlets and some art. it's been extra nice this year since it's also how one of my most inspiring creative relationships got its start, so this year there's been some pieces acknowledging the anniversary of our ocs getting together, lol. i'm still intending on doing the kink bingo, but honestly i needed a break from fandom stuff after that harassment. and i'm still trying to be careful, so it'll probably be a little while before i return to writing for a specific pairing. i refuse to let bullies stop me, though! i've got a backlog of ideas just waiting to be written and posted >:)

what with taking care of my spouse and trying to wrangle three cats on my own when one hasn't been fully introduced to the others and just. everything. i haven't had much time for daneposting but i did get my spouse to watch "happy birthday to me" the other night and i'm def gonna write a post re-evaluating my opinion of the movie. much more enjoyable watching it with another person, haha.

not looking forward to returning to work next week but we need the money :/ grateful to have been able to use FMLA but it's still bullshit that doing so means a pay cut. you'd think that needing medical leave to care for someone means your full paycheck would be even more important than ever...... i would be so much happier if i could work part time with the same level of access to health benefits (or better, but let's start small) but i guess for the time being i'll just continue doing the bare minimum at work. they don't pay me enough to care more, especially not when i have an MA and the job description only needs a BA. at least it's a foot in the door because it'll be easier for me to be considered for another job within this agency when i have the chance.

anyway, hope everyone's been doing well. i might make a more specific post about the harassment later once i refresh my memory on how locked entries work, or i might just forget about it because it really shouldn't be worth that much of my energy.

ETA: i also started playing disco elysium! i gotta pick it back up but the writing i've read so far has been incredible. i would've gladly read this as a regular novel but the interactive element does really enhance the experience (and of course there are some truly phenomenal harrykim fanworks out there).

big surgery was a success and i'm heading into week two of recovery. booyah, as i would've said in middle school. nearly done with the sakura exchange fic, i think - at least i should have something decent to turn in by the deadline.

working on a post for dane in the clown murders - what an odd movie. the screencaps have subtitles on them here and there since i was taking them during my first-ever watch-through, and i'm debating whether it's worth going back and redoing some without the subs. the video quality is pretty bad so it's not like hiding the subs would improve anything, i think. it doesn't get as visually dark/obviously damaged as rituals, but the transfer is so blurry it's clear this wasn't a movie people cared enough about to preserve in a higher resolution. i can't blame them, honestly, though it's not the worst movie i've watched for dane. solidly mediocre, which makes it a little difficult to decide on a rating, lol.

i need to catch up on reading my subscriptions here but i should wait until i'm not technically on the clock for working from home.

having a solid week off from work has done wonders for my mental health. if we could just have a four-day work week that would be such a long-term improvement!