#lolita albee

[doloresdisparue]

putting aside the crimes against humanity this sounds like it would be a blast to watch absolutely wasted. might have to at least spend the money on a script copy.

[sassmar]

ten books to know me

ohhhh tysm for the tag molly @mblematic my beloved !! <3<3 this looks so fun except that now. you will all know what created my twisted brain ah well. alas!

the outsiders by s.e. hinton haha had to start with this one! read the outsiders for the first time at like 11/12 yrs old and it was truly truly formative! PONYBOY! SODAPOP! johnny and dally!! also it's quite gay.

a separate peace by john knowles continuing with the themes of male friendship, homoerotic subtext, and books i read in middle school that fundamentally altered my brain chemistry and turned me into the freak i am today or whatever.

lord of the flies by william golding look i know the ~*~mOrAL*~*`! is arguably misanthropic/malthusian/whatever but also. forget about that. it is very gay thats all that matters. and it is ANOTHER book that i first read in middle school and then immediately reread like at least three more times bc it made me absolutely feral. also . . . . . . sucks to your assmar!!

stoner by john williams :) this one has nothing to do with weed (it is about sad academics) and also i did not read it until my twenties but. i did write like forty-five pages about why it is secretly gay! (also it is starkly beautiful and very heart-rending, i do love a book that digs around in my organs and squeezes mercilessly like a toddler playing with slime.)

the waves by virginia woolf finally a book that isnt gay JUST KIDDING it is in fact also a lil gay but mostly it's just fucking beautiful. possibly the most beautiful novel i've ever read idk, hard to say and its not a quick read but like. read it for the first time in high school and have returned to it a number of times since then and. her prose my GOD. its a novel but also a poem, just a very long love poem to .... everything ....

fun home by alison bechdel technically it's a gRapHiC nOvEL and i only read it for the first time about a year ago but. have reread it since and it continues to haunt me istg this memoir is STUNNING the most gorgeous graphic novel & most gorgeous memoir i have ever ever encountered. an actually brilliant piece of literature in every right. makes me sob. (also, yes, it is very gay.)

the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers well i HAD to include carson mccullers on the list dear god!! also so formative...read this book for the first time in high school, have returned to it a number of times since. it is. truly beautiful !!!!!! what else can i say <3.

who's afraid of virginia woolf by edward albee this is in fact a PLAY (!!) also an amazing movie but. i have read the play many many times it is SO funny, SO smart, SO painful. who needs whips when you and yr partner are. mentally torturing each other for sport. another one i read for the first time as a teen so again.... rather formative.

lolita by vladimir nabokov all right well honestly i read this for the first time in high school and enjoyed it, especially part one, thought it was smart n funny n that part two was kinda all over the place but still yknow overall felt positively about it. BUT. gave it a reread last year and jesus CHRIST i was just like !! i missed SO much !! it is not only so goddamn beautiful but SO much more complex and brilliant than i ever picked up on as a teenager my god. the prose is like the most intricate beautiful renaissance painting and the plot is like the most infuriatingly complicated game of CHESS but. it's ?? the product of a genuinely brilliant mind ?? idek but i will probably read this book at least five more times before i die its just. wow.

the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater HAHA copied you molly !!!!!! :) :) devil emoji etc. thought about choosing a book of poetry or just something else Literary but like, i recognize this list is already pretty full of Boring Classic Literature and such so i guess i can loosen my corset or whatever and say. these goddamn ya books. SPECIFICALLY the dream thieves (you are so right!) but also just the series generally jfc. i thought i hated ya but these books have changed me and everything i thought i knew about myself ....... maggie writes such poetic sentences...... "his exposed shoulder was raw and beautiful as a corpse" JESUS FUCKING !! only just read these like six months ago or something but they have utterly rewired my brain chemistry and maybe shifted the entire trajectory of my life so. i cannot. i cannot even. <3

oh shit i forgot to tag ppl um @billsfangearring @forlorngarden @shipsnsails @everythingbutcoldfire @colgatebluemintygel @perverse-idyll no pressure whatsoever xx

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week #86

The best of the week: ‘The Ear’, ‘El Dependiente’, ‘Él’, ‘Romance’.

🍿

4 films about bookstores:

🍿 ... “It was a busy Saturday afternoon, late in August, and a guy who I don’t know walks up and says “I see what you do. You sit in that chair all day long, surrounded by the things you love most in the world. And all you do, all day long, is talk to people about the things you love most in the world. And the only time you get interrupted is when someone wants to give you money”...

30 years ago, I would place the documentary Hello, Bookstore on my all time 5 best films of all time. It’s about a little, indy bookstore in small town Lenox, Massachusetts and its erudite and friendly owner. 7/10.

🍿 Funny Face (1957), a flat, old-school musical by Stanley Donen. 58-year-old fashion editor Fred Astaire and shy 28-year-old Audrey Hepburn, who runs a bohemian bookstore, fall in love. She looks and talks like she’s 20, and this May-December Romance is glossed over by some middling Gershwin tunes, and some uninspiring dance numbers, which are still the best parts of the film.

🍿 It’s hard to make a pitch-perfect romantic comedy about a single father widower with three young girls who meets Juliette Binoche in a quaint seaside bookstore. Even if your first book was ‘What's Eating Gilbert Grape'. So Dan in Real Life is far from original. Still it’s a sentimental, sweet rom-com with Juliette Binoche. 6/10.

🍿 My second by Spanish director Isabel Coixet (after ‘Paris, je t'aime’): The bookshop, another romanticised tale of a book-loving widow who decides to opens a small bookstore in a picturesque English village. Ray Bradbury and Nabokov’s Lolita play parts in the development of the story. Surprisingly, the cliched and meandering plot ends on a mostly unhappy ending. 4/10.

Adding these to the list of ‘Films About Bookstores’ that I've seen, like ‘The booksellers’ (!), 'The big sleep’, ‘Hugo’, ‘You’ve got mail’, Etc.

🍿

The Ear (1970), another enchanting discovery of a little-known masterpiece. A highly-stylized tour de force from Czechoslovakia, it was banned by the communist regime after completion, and had not been seen for 20 years. Like Albee’s ‘Virginia Woolf’, it tells of a married couple’s tumultuous night after a high-stake political soirée.

‘The Ear’ is their nickname for the Secret Police’s tiny listening devices, which they know are hidden everywhere in their apartment, and which enable the police to listen to their most intimate conversations. They are always under surveillance, and can always made to disappear in a purge. A Kafkaesque paranoic psychodrama. Highly recommended - 9/10.

🍿 

El Dependiente (The salesclerk, 1969) by Leonardo Favio, a classic film from Argentina. A strange, Lynchian story of a meek and lonely man who’s been working since childhood at a small hardware shop. The man, Fernández, dreams of inheriting the corner store when the old owner of the store dies, but then he falls in love with a lonely woman, whose mother might be mad, and whose brother is an idiot. It starts as a slow, unsettling slice of life drama but it ends in him pouring a whole bag of rat poison into their lunch soup. 8/10.

🍿 

First watch: Buñuel’s Mexican classic Él ("Him”) about a paranoid husband who goes insane of extreme jealousy for his young wife. 8/10

🍿

2 period dramas by Benoît Jacquot, both starring Léa Seydoux:

🍿I wanted to see Buñuel’s 1964 Diary of a Chambermaid with Jeanne Moreau, but couldn’t find a copy. So instead I watched the 2015 version with the beatific Léa Seydoux as Célestine. Life of a young female servant at 1890 consisted of sexual exploitations, daily humiliations and indignities. Tragic and unexpected. 7/10.

🍿 Léa Seydoux is like Greta Garbo to me: I’m completely enthralled whenever her radiant face fills the screen. In Farewell, My Queen she’s the “Reading Maid” to Marie Antoinette in Versailles during her last four days in power. Told through the servant eyes, it’s an interesting take of the French Revolution, with a bonus touch of same-sex infatuation. 6/10.

🍿

Romance (1999), my first art film directed by Catherine Breillat. What a surprise! A nuanced psychological study of a sexually-frustrated young woman, with explicit unsimulated sex scenes (including a couple with Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi). I've been looking for "mainstream” erotic movies that include hardcore, “real” but non-porn sex, and this is it. I loved it. It tells of a woman who lives with an asexual boyfriend, so she starts exploring the boundaries of her passions, and that leads her to adultery, submissiveness, sado-masochism, rape fantasies, and other adventures. It even includes a real birth, which eventually helps the woman to find some closure. Complex and intelligent! 7/10. 

🍿 

Georges Méliès’ influential 1902 A Trip to the Moon, beautifully restored & colorized. One of the earliest science fiction films.

🍿

Daniel Brühl X 2:

🍿 Daniel Brühl’s directorial debut Next door is a tight 2-men German drama. He plays a famous movie star who stops at the local bodega, before taking a taxi to an important meeting. But there he meets an older man who knows too much about his private life, having lived across the yard from his apartment. Sharp and absorbing. 7/10. 🍿 In Good Bye, Lenin! young Brühl plays an East German son in 1989-1990. His mother is devoted to the socialist regime, and she falls into coma right before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she wakes up after 8 months, the son conceals the news from her in elaborate schemes. 🍿

The Godmother of Rock and roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Photo Above) is a nice documentary about the great gospel singer and legendary guitar virtuoso who influenced so many musicians, from Little Richard, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley to Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

(Today I also learnt, that in 1951 she staged her 3rd wedding at a DC stadium, and sold 25,000 tickets to fans who enjoyed the ceremony. Although the nuptials were a initially a PR stunt, she stayed up married for 22 years.)

🍿

Loving Vincent was created by 125 actual oil-painters who painted the 65,000 frames into a van Gogh style animated feature. First time when I saw it, I loved how unique and ‘artistic’ it seemed. Watching it again, I couldn’t help noticing that it’s a fictional murder mystery (’Who killed poor tortured genius Vincent?’) and that the oils were painted over frames of the movie after it had been shot. But the story itself is over-dramatic and not very interesting.

🍿

I finally saw Jordan Peele’s recent love-letter-to-Hollywood, his UFO spectacle Nope. Atmospheric and well done when describing the relationship between taciturn brother Daniel Kaluuya and his vivacious sister Keke Palmer. It left me unsure what exactly happened and what did it mean. 

🍿

2 with Per Oscarsson:

🍿 The night visitor (originally called ‘Papegoja’n, i. e. ‘The Parrot’), is a 1971 Swedish gothic thriller. It opens on Max von Sydow running in his underwear in the snow as he escapes from an insane asylum [which reminds me that you never / hardly ever saw him exerts any physical efforts in his roles, besides talking, frowning and looking miserable!].

This is a terrible movie on every level including the insanely murderous von Sydow, his lame sister Liv Ullmann, and her inept husband Per Oscarsson. The fact that it was badly dubbed into English didn’t help. 1/10.

🍿 In the original Swedish version of The ‘Millennium Trilogy’, Per Oscarsson (Memorable as Knut Hamsun in ‘Sult’), played Salander’s kind legal guardian Holger Palmgren.

I loved the ‘Millennium Trilogy’ when it came out, I read all 3 books, also saw the films quite a few times. In re-watch, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was smooth and violent: investigative journalist Michael Blomkvist and young Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander join forces to solve a 40-year-old murder-disappearance. The Swedish title was ‘Men who hate women’, and yes, it was more about misogynist and brutal fascist men than just about detective work and revenge.

🍿

...”You mean, we’re smoking dog shit, man?”...

The original Stoner Film Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke, promoting unabashed and enthusiastic marijuana use. I forgot that the Mexican border crossing scene from ‘We’re The Millers’, and The Big Lebowski’s Roach in the crotch’ scene were both exact copies of scenes from here. Banned in South Africa during apartheid. Censors there said that the film "might encourage the impressionable youth of South Africa to take up marijuana smoking".

🍿 

The Devil's Advocate at 25 is re-emerging as a modern morality play with ‘Winning and Losing’ replacing ‘Good and Evil’. Tony Gilroy co-wrote a supernatural Rosemary’s Baby clone, and Keanu Reeves played “Kevin”, who goes against Pacino’s “John Milton”, of ‘Paradise Lost’. Unsatisfying re-watch about satanic lawyers, who represent only guilty people and always win.

🍿

First watch: Black Swan. Until the end credits came on, announcing that Natalie Portman starred in it, I was certain that it was Anne Hathaway who played the ballerina descending into madness. Either way, even before she got transformed into a “real” swan, I hated everything about this hi-brow/lo-brow ballet story. My first Darren Aronofsky film, and probably also the last.

🍿

Aloys (2016), a rare Swiss film about a sad and lonely private investigator who find himself being ‘watched’ by a mysterious woman. Vaguely reminiscent of Harry Caul, he starts hallucinating about ‘what could have been’ and ends up in a mental hospital. However, unlike ‘Coppola’s ‘Conversation’, it was tedious, confused and pretentious. 2/10.

🍿

Dugma, The Button, is a Norwegian documentary from 2016. It’s an intimate portrait of four normal al Qaida members in Syria as they train to become suicide bombers, martyrs for Allah and to “push the button”. The trailer.

I loath all religions equally!

🍿 

Throw-back to the art project:

Adora with Buñuel.

Van Gogh Adora.  

🍿 

(My complete movie list is here)

[doloresdisparue]

they're really always sending their best and brightest to review lolita adaptations aren't they

[doloresdisparue]

if anyone was wondering about the quality of the edward albee play humbert humbert randomly interrupts a scene to deny the existence of palestine

[doloresdisparue]

do we think these reviewers ever revisit the book and get really really embarrassed when they realise they got mad at something in an adaptation that was taken 100% from the text. her name is louise and she is mentioned 14 times in the book.

[doloresdisparue]

vera nabokov should have had this man sniped the second they sent her the script

[doloresdisparue]

could not have made this up if i wanted to (i do not)

if anyone was wondering about the quality of the edward albee play humbert humbert randomly interrupts a scene to deny the existence of palestine

[doloresdisparue]

if you wanna talk problematic handling of black woman characters this play also apparently omitted vivian darkbloom but i haven’t heard a peep about that from any reviewer

do we think these reviewers ever revisit the book and get really really embarrassed when they realise they got mad at something in an adaptation that was taken 100% from the text. her name is louise and she is mentioned 14 times in the book.

[doloresdisparue]

“wham, bang, thank you, ma’am” me after i resurrect edward albee solely to beat him to death with a large rock

putting aside the crimes against humanity this sounds like it would be a blast to watch absolutely wasted. might have to at least spend the money on a script copy.