Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 87 of 146

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

December 9, 20052000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw I'm offended by the marketing for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (hereafter Narnia 1)–not the trailers (which are pedestrian) or the print ads, per se, but the campaign to pre-screen reels to churches and church groups, including Colorado's wildly divisive rightwing activist organization Focus on the Family. It's not something I'm terribly surprised to see from Walden Media–but it's something that strikes me as peculiar coming from the gay-friendly Walt Disney Pictures, a studio currently "suffering" a boycott from Focus on the Family that aims, in part, to force Disney to explain their "Jekyll and Hyde" products and policies. Of the two hypocrisies, fiduciary vs. ideological, I guess I'd favour one over the other, not being in the business of weighing sins, as it were.

The Devil’s Rejects (2005) [Two-Disc Director’s Cut] – DVD

December 7, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+
starring Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, William Forsythe
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw The Devil's Rejects is a minor grindhouse classic that betrays writer-director Rob Zombie as a self-hating cinephile (he inserts a movie critic character only to abuse him) who saddles his villains with Marx Brothers aliases and cribs scenes from sources as varied as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Taxi Driver. His family of Ed Geins (Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie), her brother Otis (Bill Moseley), their uncle Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig)) proceed to Petrified Forest a family of rodeo cowboys (Geoffrey Lewis and Priscilla Barnes and others) at a motor inn after a rousing break from a siege on their farmhouse of horrors, then get hunted down and tortured by avenging angel Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe). His tongue firmly in cheek, Zombie casts a couple of '80s sitcom queens from TV shows worried about family dynamics (Barnes of "Three's Company" and Deborah Van Valkenburgh of "Too Close for Comfort") in meatbag roles while spinning southern rock classics like The Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider" over a virtuoso credit sequence (shades of Scott Caan's exceptional debut Dallas 362) and Lynrd Skynrd's "Free Bird" during its conclusion in a way that actually manages not to feel ironic or snarky. That's the tightrope Zombie walks here and he walks it with a surplus of style and skill: it's an exploitation flick about audience culpability, a splatter flick about morality, and a post-modern film that actually cares about movies.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

December 7, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

*½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Amber Tamblyn, America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel
screenplay by Delia Ephron and Elizebth Chandler, based on the novel by Ann Brashares
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Walter Chaw The quartet of best pals portrayed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are, we're told, complementary parts of one consciousness, which goes some way towards explaining why it is that individually they seem like machine-tooled fonts of tween didacticism. They're Judy Blume-spawned pods: the fat, brassy one with speeches about the importance of being fat and brassy; the slut with mother issues and speeches about regret; the frigid one who lightens up; and the morose one who learns to set aside her barbed irony at the expense of a disease-of-the-week urchin with a message of her own. Although the whole thing's too long as it is, there's barely enough room in the picture for each of the girls to have a complete narrative arc, and so we're given preachy shorthand speechifying in lieu of character complexity. It's a TIGER BEAT quiz about puberty and it's astonishingly irritating, even if you can spot glimmers of truth in there amid the weeping and screeching.

Cinderella Man (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 5, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko
screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw Of the many ways that you can read the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, the one I like is the suggestion that the artist will disappear when the masses decide to gratify themselves at the trough of empty spectacles and popular melodramas that do nothing to feed the soul. Ron Howard is at the forefront of greasing that along. Not entirely unexpectedly, his current work in television (he's the producer and narrator of "Arrested Development"), where he got his start, is, at least for the medium, complex and sophisticated. Yet his philosophy for the silver screen seems to have something to do with those three no-evil monkeys: His films have all the edge and subtext of a greeting card. They're handsome, big-budget productions with big, pretty, empty faces, and they're Pollyannaish and generally awful, uniformly, with Splash still the lone bright spot in his career. It is, after all, the only one of his films to feature an ambiguous protagonist and an existentially disquieting conclusion. The only one that acknowledges a possibility for the guys in the white hats to have a shadow as black as coal.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan: FFC Interviews Neil Jordan

December 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Ireland

Tea time with the director of your dreams

December 4, 2005|I expected Neil Jordan to be towering, imposing. From what I'd read, he was a taciturn interview given to long silences and confusing discursions–and from the intelligence of his films, I wondered if I'd be able to keep up with his sources and references. But for a man responsible for some of the most challenging, courageous, and beautiful films of the modern era (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, now Breakfast on Pluto), Mr. Jordan came off as an everyday Joe (with a light Irish brogue) still amazed by the possibilities of the medium and still feeling his way through the business. His pictures always seem to be fairytales: No matter their subject matter, there are princes and maidens, wolves and woods. (Jordan's most underestimated work (and one of my favourites), In Dreams, is entirely an evocation of fugue states.) As he was on the verge of ordering an espresso, I assured him that this place–Denver's four-star Panzano restaurant–knew how to brew tea properly (in a pot, on the table). Amused, he looked me over and said, "I suppose you'd know. Tea it is."

The Skeleton Key (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 1, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Ehren Kruger
directed by Iain Softley

by Walter Chaw Wait, let me get this straight: black folks want to be white folks? Or is it that black folks have to be white folks because the black folks who could potentially be possessed are too afraid of ghosts to hang around long enough? Screenwriter Ehren Kruger's latest illiterate piece of crap (the degree to which his script for the legitimately effective The Ring was doctored is now the stuff of Hollywood legend) addresses these and other pressing plantation-era questions when he deposits snowflake buttercup Caroline (Kate Hudson) into the heart of bayou country, deep in Angel Heart Louisiana, where every phonograph spins a Dixie Cups platter and every cobwebbed attic has a secret hoodoo room. (Who do? You do.) That it's racist in the way that a lot of privileged white people are racist (casually and ignorantly–see also: Georges Lucas and President Bush) could possibly be defended by arguing that it reflects the naivety of the film's main character, hospice nurse Caroline, positioned as sensitive because she reads Robert Louis Stevenson to her charges until they die.

War Gods of the Deep (1965)/At the Earth’s Core (1976) [Double Feature] – DVD

November 29, 20051960s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, UK

War-Gods of the Deep
The City Under the Sea
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson
screenplay by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward
directed by Jacques Tourneur

AT THE EARTH'S CORE
½*/**** Image A Sound B
starring Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant
screenplay by Milton Subotsky, based on the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by Kevin Connor

by Walter Chaw Jacques Tourneur kicks all kinds of ass. He shone in the Forties with his Val Lewton collaborations and his magnificent, atmosphere-laden pictures Night of the Demon and Out of the Past. Having turned his attention primarily to moody Joel McCrea westerns and adventure pulpers in the Fifties, Tourneur, by the time the Sixties rolled around, unfortunately found himself outside his black-and-white comfort zone (his last great work is probably an episode of the original "The Twilight Zone", "Night Call") and at the helm of productions starring people like Steve Reeves and Vincent Price. One of his last pictures–1965's abominable War-Gods of the Deep–finds its way onto DVD via MGM's admirable "Midnite Movies" line as the front end of a double feature. It's a flat, fish-eyed stinker that positions itself as a ripper of both the Price-anchored Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe films and the bona fide cycle of Jules Verne spectacles that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), continued through From the Earth to the Moon (1958) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and culminated in 1964's still-creepy First Men in the Moon, to which this film might owe its greatest debt. Ostensibly based on a Poe poem called "The City in the Sea," War-Gods of the Deep grafts its gothic settings (complete with another voiceover intro of Price reading a poem) to a Verne-like tale of a mysterious egomaniac (named "The Captain," of course, and played by Price) living in a giant, velvet-lined mansion beneath the sea, just off the coast of Cornwall.

Sky High (2005) + Stealth (2005)|Sky High [Widescreen] – DVD

November 28, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

SKY HIGH
½*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Michael Angarano, Danielle Panabaker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Paul Hernandez and Robert Schooley & Mark McCorkle
directed by Mike Mitchell

STEALTH
**/****
starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard
screenplay by W.D. Richter
directed by Rob Cohen

by Walter Chaw A kids movie for the stupid ones and a guys movie for the stupid ones of those, Sky High and Stealth are lowest-common-denominator entertainments that throw sense out the window in favour of clumsy one-liners, bad special effects, and an eye focused keen on demographics and the bottom line, which those demographics promise to fork over on opening weekend. It doesn't matter if they're good, just that they rake in enough moolah before people get a whiff of the noisome rot and ennui wafting on air-conditioned currents out of the friendly neighbourhood cineplex and start staying home again in droves. The dreadfulness of Sky High and Stealth can be measured by the extent to which this nation's timid, gaffed, untrained, dispassionate film critics equivocate in their reviews that it's for kids, that it's an enjoyable film if you check your brain at the door, and/or that it's "finally" the family/action/blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer long.

Keen, Shaven: FFC Interviews Lodge Kerrigan

November 27, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Interviews

November 27, 2005|I got off on the wrong foot with Lodge Kerrigan almost immediately (the kind of thing I can usually avoid until at least ten or twelve minutes into an interview). It was an unexpected turn of events because I'm a fan and was dying to talk to him after getting poleaxed by his first three films: Clean, Shaven, Claire Dolan, and now Keane. It was my fault; I asked him if his films were a means by which to address his prejudices when, upon consideration, his films actually force me to address my own prejudices: prejudices about mental illness, prostitution, and the general desperation of the disenfranchised. I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding so much as a bad presumption on my part–this belief that the things that made me uncomfortable and/or crazy brought out the same feelings in Kerrigan. It's a presumption so deeply ingrained in me that I never stopped to think that the things I'm a prick about aren't the same things everyone else is a prick about, making the interview almost as interesting a prod for self-examination as are Kerrigan's films.

DIFF ’05: Love, Ludlow

November 24, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Romance

**/****starring Alicia Goranson, David Eigenberg, Brendan Sexton III, Andrea Maulellascreenplay by David Patersondirected by Adrienne J. Weiss by Walter Chaw Utterly stagebound and seldom anything but a small Sundance indie version of Dominick & Eugene, Adrienne Weiss's Love, Ludlow, against all odds, kicks free of its quirk crutches at around the halfway mark--long enough for it to modestly divert, if not especially edify. "Roseanne"'s Alicia "Lecy" Goranson is a tough-talking Queens girl, Myra, charged with the care of her bi-polar, Shakespeare-quoting brother Ludlow (Brendan Sexton III). That she gives the most self-conscious performance in a film about some sort of…

Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) [Baker’s Dozen Edition] – DVD

November 24, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family

½*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C
starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Tom Welling
screenplay by Craig Titley, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw Walter Lang's 1950 version of Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey's semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen ends with patriarch Frank (Clifton Webb) kicking the bucket, and seat-warmer Shawn Levy's (fresh off the triumph Just Married) 2003 adaptation of the same ends with patriarch Tom (Steve Martin) capitulating to his simpering children. Such is the decline of courage in western popular culture that even sickening cultural artifacts like Lang's Cheaper by the Dozen out-balls an updated version fifty-three years hence. Infantile regression the rule of the day in a climate increasingly desperate to shoehorn its post-modern anti-narratives into comfortable family fare, it's interesting to consider that the original was already seen as something of a throwback to Depression-era family values at the time of its release. In conflict with the popular wag that people are stupider now than they've ever been, the excrescent original was also defended as good old-fashioned escapist fare. People are exactly as stupid as they've always been, it seems, but the lords of our popular entertainment have been noticeably castrated.

Rent (2005)

November 23, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Musical, Romance

½*/****
starring Rosario Dawson, Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin
screenplay by Steve Chbosky, based on the play by Jonathan Larson
directed by Chris Columbus

by Walter Chaw On the list of painful experiences, the modern Broadway musical ranks fairly high, so it's fair to wonder how an adaptation of Rent–by Chris Columbus, of all people–could have struck anyone as a bright idea. In all honesty, though, pretending not to understand the reasoning behind a project like this is disingenuous snobbery, because when something this terrible has proven to be that popularly galvanizing, it's only a matter of time, really, before Hollywood moneymen come calling with dollar signs in their eyes and memories of Chicago dancing in their heads. (I can only assume that that's also the reason the legendarily awful Phantom of the Opera got a greenlight with Joel Schumacher at the helm–and that Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane's stupendously popular (and similarly awful–film and play both) The Producers is set to bow this Christmas.) But with Rent, in place of a name like Webber or Mel Brooks to drive its inexplicable success, you find a genuine middlebrow cause célèbre, loaded well beyond safe with Message carried on the backs of a thundering stable of Alphabet City freaks and caricatures of freaks, each of them wilting from a romantic wasting disease (AIDS, naturally, or 'disenchantment' in place of source La Boheme's 'consumption')–the same one, not-so-incidentally, that claimed creator Jonathan Larson a few tragic months before Rent's triumphant debut on the Great White Way.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country – DVD

November 23, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Norway, Theatrical

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

by Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature–of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words–so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film–even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

DIFF ’05: The President’s Last Bang

November 20, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, South Korea, Thriller

****/****starring Song Jae-ho, Han Suk-kyu, Baek Yun-shik, Jeong Won-jungwritten and directed by Im Sang-soo by Walter Chaw Im Sang-soo's transcendently good political satire The President's Last Bang is so far the smartest, chanciest flick of the year--an alchemical brew of balls and technical brilliance that produces tremors of recognition and aftershocks of import. Whether it's DP Kim Woo-heong's rapturous tracking shots or Kim Hong-jib's tango soundtrack, there is something ineffable embedded in the fabric of the piece, making of the assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee something like the boxing sequences of Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's appropriate, with Park…

DIFF ’05: Duane Hopwood

November 18, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

*½/****starring David Schwimmer, Janeane Garofalo, Judah Friedlander, Susan Lynchwritten and directed by Matt Mulhern by Walter Chaw David Schwimmer goes the grimy indie route for actor-turned-director Matt Mulhern's sophomore feature Duane Hopwood, finding himself an alcoholic pit boss in Atlantic City about to lose custody of his two daughters to ex-wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo). Duane (Schwimmer) takes in aspiring stand-up comedian Anthony (Judah Friedlander) as a roommate/sidekick in the mold of Friedlander's previous role as a lovable spaz in American Splendor, their travails building to an unlikely custody hearing and an even unlikelier climax at one of Anthony's gigs as…

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

November 18, 20052000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane
screenplay by Steven Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
directed by Mike Newell

by Walter Chaw Just as Harry and the other arms of his archetypal triangle stumbled into adolescence with aplomb and poetry under the guidance of Alfonso Cuarón in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, they awkward-and-gangly their way into a holding pattern in Mike Newell's puttering Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hereafter Harry Potter 4). It looks grungy and it lacks grace: the moments meant to inspire are tired and the moments meant to edify are portentous and unbearably drawn-out. There's not a lot here for the non-fanatic, with screenwriter Steve Kloves failing the material for the first time and Newell showing himself to be exactly the kind of director who would make slick, protracted nothings like Mona Lisa Smile and Pushing Tin. The Newell film Harry Potter 4 most resembles, however, is Four Weddings and a Funeral (his conduit to the big time and, consequently, the one he's most likely to cannibalize when handed the golden ticket), in that this third sequel tries to worry itself about the trials of youngsters falling in puppy love, going to their first formals, and learning that there are such things in the world as death and taxes. A noble pursuit, chasing characters as they grow from chapter to chapter, from innocence to churlishness to experience (we presume)–but for me, at least, Harry Potter 4 is the first wholly dispensable instalment, repeating the best parts of Cuarón's film and adding to the conversation only the disturbing resurrection of archenemy Voldemort.

DIFF ’05: Brick

November 17, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller

**½/****starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Laura Dannonwritten and directed by Rian Johnson by Walter Chaw Brick is a cult classic-in-the-making and one for which I harbour a goodly amount of affection. (I should say I admire its chutzpah, if not its ultimate success.) It's an experiment in screenwriting and matching shots, a gimmick stretched to feature-length by first-time hyphenate Rian Johnson that puts Raymond Chandler's hardboiled lexicon into the mouths of disconsolate teens seething at a high school somewhere in the twenty-first century. It would've been a fantastic noir except for that displacement, as its coolness decomposes every…

DIFF ’05: The Matador

November 16, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Thriller

**½/****starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis, Philip Baker Hallwritten and directed by Richard Shepard by Walter Chaw Wearing a sleazebag moustache and an ugly print shirt, Pierce Brosnan watches a bartender shake his drink instead of stirring it and the film slows down and blurs accordingly. It's post-modernism as gauzy, lazy hallucination--a swoon that suggests a minor, nearly-imperceptible tremor in reality and the only moment in which hyphenate Richard Shepard acknowledges the irony of the former 007's presence in another licensed-to-kill role as assassin-for-hire Julian Noble. Fond of bottomless tequila and "sucky-fucky" instead of "blushy-blushy," Noble is an unctuous,…

DIFF ’05: The White Countess

November 15, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, UK, War

**/****starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgravescreenplay by Kazuo Ishigurodirected by James Ivory by Walter Chaw Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and…

DIFF ’05: Casanova

November 13, 20052000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Romance

*/****starring Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, Oliver Plattscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simidirected by Lasse Hallström by Walter Chaw Casanova is a perfectly dreadful Lasse Hallström/Miramax picture that can be claimed, appropriately enough, by Buena Vista now that the Weinsteins have moved on to produce this kind of stuff for their new company. It's "The Merchant of Venice" stripped of any whiff of controversy, going through the motions of its shrivelled little romantic-comedy checklist with the miserable meticulousness of the truly unimaginative. For a change, why don't you tell me how it works? Two people meet and hate…