#Films about culture

[honehonn3honey]

What happens to this empty place, waiting for my arrival...

Rook in my heart. You can read the monster list here @lustlovehart

[Alt under the cut]

This is the original version but God, I don’t see anything else and I didn’t want others to get hurt watching

Now here I put my thoughts as I drew him:

I think our beautiful creature doesn't really have a human anatomy, his limbs are long and with very little muscle covering. Their bones could click together if it fully manifested. Claws replacing part of the bony fingers and nails. You could feel the long ribs behind that thick sack

He doesn’t need beyond his big and cool gothic sack to cover his abnormal appearance, after all the is no more shadows and fog for everyone’s eyes

The darkness consumes you from the pores, in each puff of lungs, you could become one with him and he would be delighted

I feel that it is detached from all worldly, but I would keep a thing or two of those who most appreciate... like the feathers of Neige or a brooch of Vil

[rustedhills]

Disney, releasing Wish: "so it's all about legacy--the new generation surpassing the old, overcoming the evils perpetuated by them, relinquishing singular power... and there's an old man in a tower, uh... animal sidekick, i guess..., ah... magic...?

Miyazaki, just out of frame, sledgehammer raised:

[spirk-trek]

Oh, how times change...

The Voice Fanzine | Caren Parnes, 1986

[pharawee]

Jinloe dropped the teaser for their Thai adaptation of Addicted Heroin... and as someone who's neither read the novel nor watched any of the other adaptations* I actually think it's surprisingly good? I'm keeping an open mind and I'll at least check it out.

*well ok, I watched the first adaptation but it didn't really leave much of an impression.

[rosenbraut]

July. litchi lemonade. jasmine and coconut fragrances. writing a summer reading list. all white outfits with red lipstick. dancing in the kitchen. scarves worn as belts. little glass vials of perfume and face mist clinking in an overstuffed handbag. gold-shimmering body oil. dripping peaches. curtains dancing in the breeze. dreaming of lemon trees. the cool silence of a museum at noon. filling up notebooks with drafts for various essays, snippets of poetry, memories and dreams.

[inexplicably-spookified]

this week's FUCKING BNUUY FRIDAY is... oh... oh dear...

it's probably just jam

[miyagi-hokarate]

It's always going to be a little funny that Cobra Kai has Daniel sympathetically shocked to see people accuse him of racism for being a White Guy showcasing an Asian martial arts. On the Asian martial arts show directed/written by White Guys.

[that-butch-archivist]

as a baby butch i really appreciate your blog,, i feel so lost sometimes esp as a black butch as i haven't seen many sources on other studs,, so just having these lists is really awesome :)

Hey, thanks so much for reaching out, lovely to hear from you! I'm glad the lists are helping you, honestly that's everything I could have hoped for. Unfortunately, I have also found that it's strangely difficult to find material on black butches and studs ... but I am on the hunt nevertheless! As of the past two weeks a few more black lesbian anthologies have arrived and I have a few more lined up that I hope to procure soon--all this to say that I hope to present more material to you that suits your interests in the days & weeks to come. I hope we both can find good stuff for you. :)

(Which, speaking of ... if ANYONE out there happens to know where the treasure trove of black butches & stud lore is, I would happily trade my best cheesecake and/or cookie recipes for this knowledge. I can also provide manual labor and cleaning services.)

[theopiumeater]

[irlbop]

Cinephile Terzo and Theater Kid Copia.

That’s it, that’s enough to fuel this post.

[anghraine]

Today's unhinged "good God I hate how much extreme generosity I'm expected to extend to the Peter Jackson films by people who make wildly bad faith arguments about things I like" rant:

I am very deeply tired of people insisting with zero evidence that of course the LOTR films are imperfect, but the difficulties of adapting LOTR are such that it wasn't possible for them to be better than they were—in, apparently, any respect. They just couldn't be done better, at all, because it was so hard to make something watchable at all.

This is always just like ... really? Really?? Just what prevented them from making better decisions about anything? What exactly made casting every actor of color as barely differentiated villainous hordes in the twenty-first century so necessary and unavoidable? The glamorization and vast expansions of battle scenes and insertion of "heroic" war crimes was the highest film as a medium could aspire to in the early 2000s because of what insuperable force?

What made it impossible to give Arwen a coherent character arc? The films could not have been made without the underlying assumption that most of the cast are NPCs who will only do the right thing, when they will, if prodded or manipulated or influenced by main characters? In what way is this an inevitability of adaptation or film that simply couldn't have been conceptualized differently, much less better?

There is zero explanation or justification for why any of this stuff (or the myriad other flaws) had to be that way and couldn't have been done better in any way at any point. It's just stated that the films that exist must be the best films that could have existed because they're the ones that do exist and are popular. QED.

That doesn't make any sense, though, and it doesn't convince anyone who doesn't already agree. The idea that they could not have been better in any way (including their worst quality, which again, is the extremely racist casting), that some force was preventing not only the actual filmmakers but any filmmakers that could possibly exist from doing anything better just seems patently absurd.

You can like them and respect what they did achieve without demanding that everyone buy into a baseless and irrational argument that their pop culture success means nothing about them could possibly have been done any better. Look, I was in my mid to late teens at the time. I remember the early 2000s quite well. It wasn't now, but we are not talking about an age so divorced from our own that any of these things were somehow fundamental to the media landscape.

There are ways in which the LOTR films were very good that were essential to their popularity then and now. This does not require anyone to accept that it was literally impossible for them to be better than they are or that some defense is required against every criticism of them ever.

I am not, incidentally, talking about removing Bombadil, an entirely understandable and defensible decision that the film defenders in my notes somehow always feel the need to bring up. I know that changes had to be made, that adaptation is not a word for word transcription, that it would always be a difficult text to adapt, that structurally minor elements had to go, that they are cinematically beautiful films that a lot of work and love went into. I know this. EVERYONE knows this, because for the last 20 years it's been impossible to criticize anything about them without being reminded. Their accomplishments, and their existence, do not mean that any choice made by the filmmakers must definitionally have been the right call and could not possibly have been better in any way.

[yllu-stration]

Finally watched Brokeback Mountain, because Isa mentioned on twitter that it was Ghoap coded. It truly is.

Besides that, it's such a fantastic, powerful and important film. It should be in school curriculums to watch it and write a dissertation on it and the cultural problems (current and historical) it represents.

[wormtoxin]

for the record my disco elysium voices are The Wretch, Trivia, Cultural Critique, Marxist Facsimile, Poetics, Hound Brain, Etymology and The Witch

[devilsskettle]

i think some of the popularity that meta horror has garnered is a little bit disingenuous tbqh even though i do like some of the movies that have come out of the subgenre, people don’t realize that the foundation of the slasher genre was established in the 60s/70s and a lot of the 80s movies that have become so classic were already riffing off of the tropes established by those movies before full fledged meta took off. the idea to make friday the 13th was sparked by the commercial success of halloween. the original script for slumber party massacre was a parody of the genre and the movie retains much of that humor which is referential to past slashers by nature. + it intentionally uses typical slasher tropes around gender and sexuality to bring forward the concerns of teenage girls. is that not something that meta horror is frequently touted as doing? child’s play is like a slasher, “except —” which is what a lot of meta horror comedies do now (“slasher except it’s a possessed doll” is not that far off from “slasher except it’s freaky friday” and whatnot). this isn’t to say that scream isn’t foundational to what the slasher genre evolved into or that contemporary meta slashers aren’t doing something interesting but i also think they tend to lean towards cynicism towards the movies they’re deriving their themes from + they’re not even as different as they think they are from “classic” 80s movies that already are borrowing from classic slashers which in turn borrowed from even older horror (for example, in halloween, laurie is watching the thing from another world from the 50s which was adapted into the now classic john carpenter’s the thing in the 80s). and of course many of these older horror movies were adapted from literature which also inspired more literature. like the shelley/byron/polidori scary story writing contest is now legendary but also you don’t get the shining without the haunting of hill house (and you don’t get the haunting of hill house without turn of the screw, for example) and the shining is probably one of the most referenced movies by other media of all time. horror has always been an intertextual genre let’s stop pretending it didn’t become “self aware” until 1996

[seeminglyseph]

I know everyone hates M Knight Shyamalan's The Village, and "oooh it's modern day all along" seems like a lame twist, but consider:

A) wool cloaks fuck and that's always a cool look and I won't apologize for the fact that I definitely just wanted to wear cloaks instead of coats even though I live somewhere that experiences winters in Hardcore Mode and that was not viable

And B) the concept that your parents decided for you that you had to live in a dangerous and reductive environment and raised you on fear and punishment and secrecy because they hated the way society was developing and didn't want you to have access or choice was like. Extremely real fore as someone raised Catholic with multiple friends raised either Jehovah's Witness or Mormon. Like, obviously, it was extremely exaggerated as a 2000s horror-thriller type movie, but like.

It's no Lady in the Water. I honestly haven't seen The Village in a bit, but in concept, I think it does make sense as a cult movie. It's just that too much is like... "oooo it's a twist!" Rather than, like... "damn, the adults of this movie have a cult compound that they have used to isolate, indoctrinate, and control their children, literally creating and becoming monsters that haunt and torment them to keep them in line to maintain a way of life in line with their own moral values"

And like. If you look at it through the lens of like. The emotional impact of how much betrayal goes on within the film in the families and the cult and for the children who had no choice to be there and no information, like. That's much more impactful than simply "it was modern day all along"

It's "your parents have been lying to you all along, and all of your pain and fear has served no greater purpose. Half of these rules were not to keep you safe. They were to make you obey, and you have no way of knowing which are which. The people you trust have deeply and intentionally fractured your relationship with reality as a way to keep you contained and docile and under control. You have been betrayed on the most fundamental level by the people who were supposed to raise you and guard you and keep you safe."

And that's like. That's good horror that sticks in the back of your brain forever? Idk. Maybe my imaginary Village is better than the real Village but like. I think it's a better movie than it gets credit for.

And I want more excuses to wear wool cloaks, like damn.