He wears his blue New Balance sneakers and the black socks with the Nike Swoosh on them, camouflage shorts, and a T-shirt. And his G-Shock watch. Always his G-Shock watch, the kind that’s chunked up with cool functions and you can really beat it up. That is one of Gabe’s hobbies: G-Shock watches.
With his hands in his pockets, he walks along a curve in the road on his way to the farm shop a mile away. They sell coffee and sandwiches and stuff there. Gabe doesn’t drink coffee, and he is not especially hungry just now, but he walks there anyway, like he does most days. Not every day. But most days. It’s private, just him, the way other people do. And it helps make the days go by until the next day, which might be better than this day.
He is the only person walking along the road, so there’s no one to compare himself with, none of the people who are all the same. Most people are the same as one another, which makes Gabe different. On this road he sometimes even forgets, but only for a few seconds. He thinks all the time about the fact that he is different. It’s stuck inside him—that’s how he puts it. He thinks about it in the shower, he thinks about it while he’s watching Indiana Jones movies, and he thinks about it while he’s cooking eggs on the stove, which he is getting better at. “Sssomeone told me that before,” he says, the S sound extending for a syllable. “That I’m different. Down syndrome is not a sickness. There’s no vaccine for it. If there was, I would take it.”
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A few weeks ago, after we got home from work and the Atlanta weather had cooled off, my husband, August, and I were out for a walk, as couples have done since time immemorial. As each of us absentmindedly reached out for the other’s hand, we shared a subtle nod with two well-dressed men who passed us on the opposite side of the path. I thought it was nothing more than an unspoken, gentlemanly, “How d’you do?” But August interpreted it as something else.
“It’s weird that for the first 15 years of our relationship, nobody paid any attention to whether or not we were holding hands,” August said. “Now it’s a political statement.”
What had changed? Three or four years ago—it’s hard to pin down the exact date—August wasn’t my husband. They were my wife.
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Darth Vader might have been just another masked villain if not for four words. You know the ones: Luke Skywalker is clinging to a windblown gantry as the masked Imperial monster reaches out and reveals that he did not kill Luke’s father. “I am your father,” Vader intones.
With that revelation in The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars galaxy became more than a space adventure about good and evil. It became a metaphor for the age-old conflict between generations. This twist raised a question in the mind of the hero, something also asked by everyone as they grow up and start their own lives: Am I any different?
As I wrote the new book Star Wars Icons: Vader, it became ever clearer that the fatherhood theme was the key factor in the creation and evolution of the most famous screen villain of all time. Fortunately, we had 500 oversize pages to explore the idea. I found that virtually everyone involved in the making of Vader had a compelling fatherhood story that in various ways guided them and shaped their eventual contribution to the character. This is the hidden source of Vader’s strength.
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It takes three security checks to get into a room that holds a billion dollars in jewels. Badge, photo ID, badge again. And then, there you are: a high-security vault, except it is more than eighty thousand square feet, with twenty-eight-foot ceilings. This was the exhibition space inside the Wynn Las Vegas, which every year hosts two of the jewelry trade’s biggest events.
The first thing that hits you is the scale. It’s room after huge room full of dealers and connoisseurs. Everyone in the crowd is dressed basically one of two ways: for dealing (casual, so the jewelry does the talking) or for showing off (the dandies wearing their best pieces). The wide aisles keep everything visible. The lighting is unreal, built to maximize the appeal of precious metals and dazzling stones.
Both shows are for the trade only; members of the public are not allowed. But a few years ago, a dealer got me in, and I’ve been going to both ever since. They always run at the same time, and they’re the best places to see the cutting edge of what will show up in the top personal collections in the coming years—and, after that, what will become part of the personal style of guys across the country.
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The man Alexander Skarsgård plays in Wicker may be woven together with sticks and straw, but he’s the kind of guy you want to be. Never mind that he’s a literal basket case. Mystical forces bring him to life, but he proves himself to be more grounded than most of the ordinary people in his village. He’s a devoted partner, a helpful neighbor, a tireless worker, and, on top of it all, an impressive lover. Those who don’t adore him completely loathe him, usually for the exact same reasons.
The bawdy storybook comedy, which hits theaters on Friday, is written and directed by the husband-and-wife filmmaking team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who adapted it from the short story “The Wicker Husband” by Ursula Wills. “A lot of our own relationship was examined when we were writing the film,” Wilson says.
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We used one simple criterion for this list: If you asked someone, “What’s the scariest movie of all time?” could you imagine them saying one of the 25 films below? Some difficult decisions followed. Alien is one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, but is it one of the scariest films of all time? Paranormal Activity kicked off one of the most profitable horror franchises in film history, but is it still taken as seriously as it was nearly 20 years ago? Does a film like Jaws, once called the scariest movie of all time, leave real and lasting scars?
Naturally, there’s no winning on the Internet. Modern horror heads will say that Psycho isn’t scary anymore. They’ll tell us that Insidious has a terrible ending, or that The Blair Witch Project is only terrifying for a couple of iconic scenes. Let the comments come—we can take it. But we believe the 25 movies below represent the gamut of jump scares, dread, torture, legacy, and everything else you could want in a film deserving of the title of the scariest movie of all time.
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