Kylux Stan

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Goncharov (1973) before!!!! I watched it last night and was blown away. Truly ahead of its time.

Twenty three - Guayaquil & Lima

The alarm woke us up at 4.45 and it wasn't nice. We quickly got dressed and got an uber to the airport. After checking in we used our remaining Ecuadorian change on very expensive but nice looking chocolate. Mike had a sleep (having had a bad night's sleep) before we boarded to travel to our next country!

We tried to sleep on the flight, which was a on surprisingly nice LATAM plane. Mike, as always surprised even himself with his ability to sleep on transport and before we knew it we were in Lima. As we got off the flight I noticed a lot of people wearing athletic uniforms. Looking closer I saw the Olympic symbols; we were travelling with Olympians! If I was up on my sports maybe I'd have known who they were but lots of people were taking their photos when we landed.

We got a taxi to our hostel, in the perpetually cloudy desert city (it never rains!), through terrible traffic jams before emerging onto a highway along the seafront. On the way we saw temporary stadiums and stands for Lima 2019, the Pan-American Games! Suddenly the Olympians on the flight made sense! After 45 minutes we reached the hostel and had the quickest check-in and sort out turnaround so far. We were worried if we stopped we'd fall asleep. Instead we walked from the hostel through the Barranco suburb and the along the Malècon to the Milaflores district. Barranco had a real Bristol feeling to it with lots of street art and hipster cafes. Milaflores was definitely the upmarket part of town with fancy sea view apartments and a shopping mall on the cliff front.

As Lima is such a foodie city we really wanted to do a food tour but tickets are so pricey, $100 each!! So instead we took ourselves on a food tour. With a bit of research and Mike navigating the tour began. Before leaving Barranco we had to have what every good food tour starts with, an ice cream! The gelateria looked good and very hipster. It used local produce and flavours to create exotic and delicious ice creams. After trying a few flavours I decided you just can't go wrong with chocolate, especially when it's from South America. So we opted to share a scoop of chocolate nibs and it was absolutely delicious; Swoon in Bristol has a clear rival.

After the fairly long Malècon walk to work up an appetite the second stop was a ceviche place but as we neared we saw long queues outside. By this point it was getting later and we were getting hungry so decided to move on to the next stop, thinking we could come back another time when we'd booked. So the next stop was next to Park Kennedy, a park where all the stray cats live because they're treated so well! The cats are vaccinated, fed, watered and put up for adoption when they can be. There are loads in the park sunbathing and being stroked. Of course I couldn't resist so immediately looking for the nicest looking for a cuddle.

While in the park we spotted a churros seller which was another stop so quickly bought a couple to have. I think this was mainly as a distraction for Mike so he didn't get annoyed with me and the cats. The churros were filled with caramel, crunchy and sweet mmmm! And only 75p each!

After the churros we found a restaurant as our next stop. We ordered our first pisco sour (spirit made from grapes, lime juice, egg white, bitters), an Inca Kola, and a rocoto rellenos to share. The drinks arrived and the pisco sour was strong! Considering we hadn't eaten much it went to both of our heads immediately. The Inca Kola was bizzare, it wasn't like cola which is what I was expecting but was more like bubblegum panda pop. The more we drank the more we liked it.

The food came next and I'm salivating at the thought of it. Rocoto rellenos is a slightly spicy red pepper stuffed with mince, vegetables and cheese. I don't know exactly what else went into it but it was absolutely delicious. And what made it even better were the dauphinoise potatoes that accompanied it. They were creamy and cheesy and delicious. We were very happy. It was supposed to be a starter but was massive!

Slightly wobbly after the pisco sour we headed to the next destination but quickly realised we were flagging from our lack of sleep. We popped into a hipster coffee/book shop for a Peruvian espresso and to use their WiFi to do a quick bit of organising. A perpetual task, but the best coffee we've had on the trip!

After coffee the next stop was a Chifa restaurant. Peru is heavily influenced by the Chinese that came here as cheap labour after they abolished slavery. Chifa restaurants are everywhere and Peruvian cuisine is influenced by Chinese flavours. We sat down and ordered a lomo saltado to share. It turns out you could only order that as part of a set menu so we had to order spring rolls too. It was basically a beef stir fry, but with chips in the gravy style sauce, served with fried rice. Mike loved it as it was basically two of his favourite things combined, chips in gravy and fried rice! It was great but after the rocoto rellenos I think anything would struggle to compare.

The next stop was a stall back in Kennedy Square. It served a Peruvian delicacy, pork buns. We shared one, and putting on our snooty food critique hats compared it to the one we had in Guayaquil. This had salty pork in delicious bread with a slice of sweet potato in that provided sweetness and moisture, while the one in Guayaquil was juicier (covered in gravy) but plain.

Our final stop was to try and find another stall selling picarones, a ring donut, but made with sweet potato! We walked around the park three times looking but unfortunately didn't find one. We had to make do with another churro and stroking some more cats!

Feeling stuffed and completely exhausted (we'd been wandering around for 6 hours!) we sneakily reused the WiFi at the coffee shop to get an uber back to the hostel.

When we got in we realised tonight was the opening ceremony for the Pan American Olympic games, happening just round the corner! We both sat down and watched the ceremony while organising some more.

The ceremony was amazing and I felt so excited and weirdly proud. I don't know what the Olympics does to me (maybe I was remembering the London Olympics?) but I felt like I was going to cry! The Peruvians put on an amazing show with a huge mountain in the middle of the stage which lit up with projections. The performers were all in traditional dress and took us through the story of Peru. It was cool to see all the things we'd come to Peru for encapsulated in the show and made me excited for the rest of our travels!

We went to be very early that night and luckily we had nice dorm mates that didn't seem to mind, but did find it funny that we were sleeping in a bunk bed in a dorm on our honeymoon. I call it a good night's sleep!

Supernatural literally flips this narrative. Two Peruvian immigrants are shown to be sucking the fat out of wealthy white middle-upper class people. Instead of the conquistadors being parasites, now it is the Native Peruvian people. THEY LITERALLY MADE THEIR ONLY TWO PERUVIAN CHARACTERS (and some of their only Latine characters) P A R A S I T E S. That is so messed up. But even more messed up is that, in doing so, they flipped the script from “white people come to Peru to steal land, livelihoods, and lives from Native peoples” to “Peruvian people come to America to steal white lives and livelihoods.” Sound familiar? This flipping of the script is textbook colonialist rhetoric. And these two “Pishtacos” moved to the US to get AWAY from the Pishtacos back home who kill people, so that they can try to “help people” instead. (Because fat shaming is AWESOME, but that needs to be a different post.) They need to leave their homeland for America to find a “better way.” The implication being that the Peruvian people back in Peru are savages, and in order to stop being savage, you must become American (and buy into both capitalism and fat shaming, which—again—is not a concept endemic to Indigenous Andean peoples). And the woman who can “civilize” (THIS WORD IS LITERALLY USED IN THE EPISODE!) herself is co-owner of the business, while her brother who refuses to assimilate is reduced to a menial job that is literally coded as menial BOTH culturally and by Dean’s reaction to getting assigned that job himself. Hello assimilation narrative!

And then, of course, the Latina woman’s white husband calls her brother a freak (which means he obviously thinks on some level that she’s a freak as well). White boy literally threatens to deport(/kill???) the brother and tells him his sister WANTS HIM TO BE DEPORTED (after all, she is the one who demoted him for not assimilating well enough)! And she ultimately sells him out by putting her white husband over him even though the husband’s already dead! Because the Winchesters are the only people who are allowed to save their sibling-who-is-killing-people and have that be the right thing to do every. damn. time. Family loyalty is the most important thing if you’re white people, but if you’re not white, assimilation should trump everything else. And even then it’s not quite enough, because no matter how much you assimilate you will never actually be white. (Don’t ask me about my generational trauma wrt this lolol.) In Supernatural terms, even if you’re not a killer, you’re still a monster.

The whole thing just reinforces the idea that the very presence of Latine people in the US threatens white American livelihoods (again, traditionally in the Andes fat symbolizes life and health) and lives. Because of course all the clients are white. And overall it basically sends the message that Latine people can’t be successful business owners, or if they are it’s because they’re “cheating” somehow or doing something underhanded literally at the expense of white people. And the bros deport her at the end of the episode, thus signaling that even those Latine immigrants who give in to the pressure to assimilate and even put white people above their own families still don’t belong here and are dangerous because they’re “feeding off the system.” Because that’s the rub—to become “civilized,” you must not only become an American, but a WHITE American, which you can never do. And deporting her is framed as a mercy! Because they didn’t kill her! And the true monsters—the white people who try to enforce cultural assimilation and then reject any efforts as not enough—walk free. The Winchesters are once again protecting the white American way of life.

Ben Barnes as Billy Russo in The Punisher. (Photo: Netflix)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the second half of The Punisher‘s first season.

When Ben Barnes accepted the role of Billy Russo on The Punisher — the new Netflix series starring Marvel’s famous gun-toting vigilante, Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) — he knew that a dark future awaited his character. After all, in the comic book realm, Russo frequently dispenses and endures punishment as the gruesomely scarred villain, Jigsaw. And though the show changed some details about Billy’s origins — making him Frank’s longtime friend rather than his longtime nemesis, for example — his ultimate fate wasn’t likely to be altered. So for Barnes, the question wasn’t “Will Billy break bad?”; it was “When will Billy break bad?” The show’s producers didn’t mind making him wait to find out. “They were fairly clandestine even with me about any sort of twists and turns,” the British actor tells Yahoo Entertainment. “We were shooting Episode 5, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Is there going to be a turn? Is it going to happen?‘”

Turns out that Barnes had to wait only one more episode. At the end of the sixth hour, “The Judas Contract,” Billy emerges as one more member in the conspiracy that odd-couple allies Frank and Micro (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) are working to unwind. That revelation sets the two on a collision course that ends with Frank essentially creating the man who will become Jigsaw.

We spoke with Barnes about the scene that reveals Billy’s true nature, and why his memorable role as Logan on Westworld made him a better bad guy.

Yahoo Entertainment: Were you excited to play the moment where it’s revealed that Billy has been part of the conspiracy against Frank all along? Ben Barnes: We did a read-through of each episode before we started filming them, and I remember the read-through for “The Judas Contract” very specifically. Our showrunner, Steve Lightfoot, was there, and so were some of the executives from Marvel and Netflix. We finish reading the episode, and there’s the reveal of who Billy’s in league with. I remember Steve going, “Billy Russo, you dirty, dirty boy.” I just looked at him and went, “You wrote it!” [Laughs] They were quite excited about that turn because after that point, Frank Castle is battling the powers that be in a more general way, as well as his inner demons and stuff. So it’s nice to get a little bit more specific about it. The truth is that there’s not really any kind of a traditional big bad [guy] in the comic book sense in this particular series. It’s an origin story for both of the characters in a way. While they’re at odds by the end of the series, they haven’t become each other’s nemeses yet.

Once the reveal happened, I wanted to go back and rewatch Billy’s scenes up to that point to see how that reveal was teased in your performance. Obviously, I did know it was coming, and I was asking all sorts of questions about my involvement in things, but they wouldn’t tell me exactly what they had planned for the future. I would want to know what my involvement had been in Frank’s past — I needed to be up to date on that stuff at least. So when I’m playing my game of cat-and-mouse with Dinah Mandi [played by Amber Rose Revah], I could sort of pick and choose as an actor what moments are feeling a little more genuine or whether he’s a ruthless liar through and through. I thought it was interesting to see for the first time in a Marvel series such a slow burn in terms of character. You genuinely don’t know what side this person is on.

What sort of discussions did you have with Jon Bernthal about how much Frank knows, or suspects he knows, about Billy? We had a lot of discussions about their pasts, and we actually shot some scenes that may be being saved for any future seasons that might come about. There was exploration of their history as friends, and we see them together as partners and as “Uncle Bill” in terms of his relationship to Frank’s family. In a lot of these universes, the “villain” has done something that’s wronged the hero in such a way that can never be forgiven, but in Billy’s case, a lot of the other characters have done much worse things in terms of organizing the massacre of his family or trying to keep him at bay. I think that Billy’s betrayal is only keeping information from him, which in the grand scheme of the Marvel universe is not the worst crime that’s ever been perpetrated. However, because of their closeness and their brotherhood, it seems so much more.

Barnes with Jason R. Moore in The Punisher. (Photo: Netflix)

And for my money, Billy is actually kind of broken from when he’s a boy, so Frank is the one man he has respect for. He sees something of himself in him, and I think that’s what makes the betrayal sting for Billy too. Because when you’re playing these characters with such different shades of morality, it’s important in portraying that character to believe everything I’m doing is absolutely on the level. I actually feel a bit sorry for Billy in certain circumstances. What he’s doing is out of self-preservation and love, and it might be for the wrong, but I wanted to play it that he cares very deeply about Frank. I don’t think the story really works unless Frank holds a special place in Billy’s life.

In a sense Billy is already broken, so his final transformation into Jigsaw — when Frank slices his former friend’s face on glass — is a case where he finally looks on the outside the way he does on the inside. Yeah, absolutely. I sort of saw it in stages, like a game of Jenga. Billy was essentially orphaned and abused as a child, and that’s corrupted him a certain way. But from being in the military, he’s built up this kind of incredible mask, which is based on the way he looks, the way he dresses, and the way he treats women. It’s all this giant mask, so the idea of the shattering of that mask is the final thing in terms of losing how he sees himself. That’s part of the idea of using mirrors in our version — as this cautionary tale of narcissism. And that’s stacked up against the idea that he could have brain damage in some way, which they mention in the last episode. I have no idea what they’re going to give in terms of how the Jigsaw character will be revealed, but I certainly have my ideas about how it could work, and how he could be a more traditionally threatening figure in the Marvel universe.

How important was your role on Westworld in terms of transitioning from the heroes you played early on in your career to the more villainous roles you’re playing now? It looks like you’re really enjoying being bad. It certainly helped prepare me in terms of the boldness of my choices. Earlier on in my career, I felt like if any accusations were leveled at me, it was that my performances were a bit traditional and what people were used to. So I made a decision that I’m just going to be a bit braver, and I think that Westworld allowed me the opportunity to do that — to really kind of stretch my legs in terms of mischief. Obviously, the two characters are very different; Logan is more of a pain in everyone’s neck. One thing I asked is that he never say something that wasn’t true. There was one line where he had to [lie], and I told [the writers], “It’s really important to me that Logan never lies.” He’s weirdly a bit of a moral compass for the real world, I think. Of course, I have to be on his side because I have to play him! But yeah, I did want to take some of that momentum through to The Punisher and be a little more broken and evil and malicious. I’m having fun pushing where that can go.

Will Logan be back in Westworld‘s second season? I am back a little bit in the second season, which is not something I necessarily expected! But I am back, and I will say that everything that I’ve encountered so far is different. I have not read full scripts or anything, but it’s certainly flipped me upside down in terms of what I was expecting from the series. No one’s going to be disappointed in terms of it pushing the envelope!

Season 1 of The Punisher is currently streaming on Netflix.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

Review: ‘The Punisher’ makes ultraviolence seem inevitable

Review: ‘Marvel’s Runaways’: Cool teens versus villainous parents

Billy Russo, who in the comics goes on to be fearsome and scarred villain Jigsaw, gets origin treatment in season 1 of The Punisher, according to Westworld alum Ben Barnes. Expect to see a Russo like you’ve never seen before.

“In terms of incarnation and portrayal of the character, there will be mostly surprise and mostly kind of a fresh take,” Barnes said. “What I loved about it is the idea that you look at some of these more obvious villains in the different shows, and they’re very much that [villain] from the outset. In this show, even I’m not quite sure exactly where he’s headed.”

In this case, Barnes said that the “main change” that was made for season 1 is that Russo is first introduced as Castle’s longtime war buddy.

“He was in the special forces with Frank Castle, so they have this shared history going back and this intimacy,” Barnes said. “He refers to Billy as his brother, and so they have this unity between them. That’s what this show will have above and beyond how they’re portrayed in the comics. We meet that relationship before the beginning, and I think that gives you an enormous variety of tangents that you could escape down, and I don’t know which one they’re going to choose in the end…. We don’t know exactly what we want Billy Russo to be and we expect of him. And so we have an opportunity to toy with it and make him a little bit unpredictable, which I really enjoyed.”

From Captain Marvel Vol. 10 #028, “Strange Magic - Part 1”

Art by Jacopo Camagni and Espen Grundetjern

🌙🌌 “[T]hey both wore the same expression… It was the first sight of land, the hope of shelter and even salvation that might await you on a distant shore.” 🌌🌙

Because I am SO done of seeing bs on the internet from people who only watched Infinity War or hate Stephen.

1. Wiping minds

Some people noticed that the plot for Spider-Man: No Way Home is quite similar to that one time in which Stephen conjured a spell to erase people’s memories on Peter’s identity so he could have his life back after Civil War.

We will get there. But before we touch this specific story, we’re going back to the 60′s, in Strange Tales v1. Stephen was basically a M.I.B. He used to erase people’s minds ALL THE TIME but there IS a reason. The first is, Lee and Kirby didn’t know a better way to defeat magic users, mostly because Stephen (usually) doesn’t kill. So how do you lock someone who can easily escape through magic? It’s simple. You make them forget magic. And this is how Stephen “punished” the evil sorcerers who dared attack innocent people.

There’s also the concept that people cannot bear the idea that the supernatural is real. Even Moon Knight did that for years, Stephen being the first one to tell him the supernatural is very real.

When it comes to Peter? Stephen was guided by guilt for not taking sides in Civil War. I’ve talked about this before. So it’s only natural to asssume he’d do anything to make it up for the ones he wronged, starting with the New Avengers and, of course, Peter Parker, the one who suffered the most with this event. This is why Stephen summons Superior Iron Man and Reed Richards and force them to be accountable for their mistakes.

Of course, this begets the issue of morality. But please be aware that your heroes are not perfect. They make TONS AND TONS of mistakes. You’re just wrong to assume your fave is perfect because there’s no such thing as perfection, and comics are fantasy based on human emotions. Your heroes on big screen WILL make mistakes because they ARE humans, stop whining and deal with it.

2. Out of character?

Please, shut up. You’re just embarrassing yourself. Let me show why.

2.1. MCU!Stephen

MCU!Stephen is an adorable and arrogant dork. He will mess up with time even when he was told not to. He’s light-hearted whenever he’s around Wong. And maybe he will even smile before pain and death. You just watched Infinity War and assumed Stephen was a serious, edgy, arrogant and perfect sorcerer. He’s not. He’s so much more. Gods, people who say this are so stupid, please, I’m becoming dumber and dumber whenever I read their bs.

Try me, Beyoncé.

2.2. Comics!Stephen

Messing up a spell (Damnation #1)

Being goofy (X-Statix Presents: Deadgirl #2)

Being a reckless little b1tch (Avengers v8 #5)

Literally casting a spell to wipe people’s memories of Peter Parker along with Tony and Reed because Peter asked him to do so. (Amazing Spider-Man #641)

Point me again where Stephen is out of character, please?

2.3. bUt iT’s NoT cOmIcS

Scott Derrickson didn’t use the darkest references to write Doctor Strange (2016) for you to come and complain about Stephen’s characterization and discredit comic books shut up shut up shut up pleaaase EVERYTHING YOU’RE SEEING ON THE BIG SCREEN WAS HEAVILY INFLUENCED BY COMICS. YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY BE THIS STUPID. Also here’s a very rational analysis between the two versions. They’re ridiculously similar.

3. Messing up a spell

Every

Magic user

Messes up

Spells

I hope this helps.

4. Summing up