#this could also work with ace travis? very open to interpretation

[walkinroadkillz]

may i talk a bit about how i like to interpret Travis as a gay man

CW: homophobia

I just think it would sorta make sense. He was raised in a redneck southern family, where his younger brother who's a father and who had a wife is definitely the favorite child. So this already shows the values of the Hacketts pretty well, they are traditional as hell and this whole "family is the most important" thing.

And Travis is the black sheep of the family. From the scene with Constance, particularly Travis' reaction I believe it was *not* the first time she has gone off at him like that, seeing how he just basically stands there and takes it, like he's used to this. We don't know much about their life before the curse etc, but assuming she has treated him like this for a longer while, him being gay and therefore 'against the traditional family archetype' could be a possible reason for this treatment.

I don't wanna just say "he's single" as an argument because there are many reasons for people to be single, but I just wanna say that looking through this lense at it would also make sense. Once again, given his family background, it would make sense if he just gave up on romance altogether because he'd know his family would never accept it. And family is the most important.

And I also think he absolutely would not come out to them, especially Constance, but she *could* catch on at some point, which would build the distance we see between Travis and the rest of the Hacketts during the game. He still loves them, he covers for them and tries his best to fix their problems - but at the same time it looks like he's not as close with his family as in the past.

(I'd like to think Chris could actually be accepting of Travis if he ever did come out, seeing how he spends the most time with the youth where being LGBTQ+ is more normalized, so he definitely witnessed some non-heteronormative romance among the youngsters. Maybe even Ryan could be the one to come out to him, or at least talk about his sexuality as he's trying to figure himself out, given that Chris is a father figure to him. And from the small amount of knowledge we have, a pretty good one at that. But at the same time I do think Travis would be the type to keep this to himself, and just bottle it up alone rather than vocalizing the internal struggle about being different.)

Another thing. How many southern redneck cishet 56y/o men have the term "bestie" in their vocabulary.

I am in no way saying he's implied to be gay in the game, nothing of this sort, all I mean is that it's a perspective I kinda enjoy. For the additional angst or something, as if he doesn't have enough problems in his life.

I also enjoy calling Laura and Max lesbians so, I do enjoy joking about Laura and Travis forming a wlw+mlm solidarity. 💪

If anyone read that, thanks and I'd love to hear what you think, I love reading way too deep into fictional characters and having discussions about it ♡´･ᴗ･`♡

[aion-rsa]

Cruella: Does Every Villain Need a Sympathetic Origin Story?

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Clearly this isn’t your parents’ Cruella De Vil. This isn’t even your Cruella De Vil. However, there is something fiendishly charming about seeing Emma Stone charge into a ballroom and light her black and white dress on fire, revealing a chic red number beneath that would do Scarlett O’Hara proud. If fashion is a statement, Cruella is here to say the villain has just arrived!

Yet one can’t help but shake the certainty that by the time we actually learn the plot of Disney’s Cruella reimagining, Cruella will be in anything but black and white, or fiery red. Rather Cruella is obviously posturing to take a sideways approach to an old classic. But then again, that increasingly feels like the only direction these Hollywood redos know: the sympathetic origin story for an iconic villain.

To be clear, we’ve only gotten a glimpse of Stone as the new Cruella, and she looks absolutely fabulous in a black leather coat and cane, purring, “I’m only getting started, darling.” There’s a wildness about this interpretation befitting our current era where Harley Quinn is the hero of her own story, and Wade Wilson now leads a Disney franchise. Nevertheless, when I watch Cruella on the edge of tears in the trailer, barking defiantly that she is CRUELLA—and seemingly embracing an unfair reputation that other characters may be placing on her—a nagging question persists in the back of my head: Do we really need a sympathetic Cruella De Vil?

The trend of supervillains getting intellectual property-expanding sob stories is nothing new, be it at Disney or anywhere else in Hollywood. Maybe 25 years ago when folks liked their villains big and outlandish—think Glenn Close in Disney’s previous live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians—it was novel to see the antagonist become a tragic protagonist. But like everything else with modern blockbusters, that all changed a long, long time ago with something called Star Wars.

Back in 1977 when the original Star Wars movie was released, many audience members left the theater giddy about the world George Lucas created. In a galaxy far, far away, every pop fantasy of the mid-20th century—Wizards! Knights! Princesses! Samurai! World War II ace pilots!—was thrown into a massive cauldron that seamlessly blended these elements.

Luke Skywalker’s galaxy felt like a real place of exotic, lived-in locales, all of which captured that dirt-under-the-fingertips, tactile quality so rarely seen in fantasy stories. Sure the characters might be archetypes, but they came with histories which gave their fantasy space battles human density. Old Ben Kenobi fought in the Clone Wars with Luke’s father Anakin, who was “a gifted pilot.” But what exactly was a clone war? And why was there more than one of them? Also, what did a Jedi’s “more civilized age” look like for Luke’s papa?

For more than 20 years, no one knew the answer to those questions, which made them all the more intriguing, and the “lore” of this fantasy evermore mythic. Then came Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, the first modern blockbuster prequel devoted to filling in the gaps left by a beloved classic’s mysteries. That movie’s problems are numerous, but at its core the most persistent, lingering issue may still be the reveal that Darth Vader was once a blonde haired little boy with the emotional range of Beaver Cleaver. Of course everyone knew in the abstract sense Vader was once a child… but did they ever really want to see it?

Additionally, did anyone really want to learn Anakin Skywalker’s reason for turning to the Dark Side is because of a bratty streak that followed him into adulthood? Probably not.

Nonetheless, all three Star Wars prequels made massive amounts of money and rather than becoming cautionary tales of what happens when you attempt to explain away all the mysteries of a beloved character, they were the first steps toward a modern staple of media regurgitation where seemingly every mug, pug, and thug would get their own sympathetic redo.

Since then, we’ve learned on screen that Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis Venom, is really a well-intentioned bloke caught in a bad romance (with his alien space buddy), Batman’s arch-nemesis the Joker is really just a Travis Bickle clone with mommy issues, and Maleficent, the reigning empress of badassery in the Disney Villain canon, was really just a woman scorned by Sleeping Beauty’s toxic father. Even Hannibal Lecter became a victim in Hannibal Rising, and the Wicked Witch of the West starred in the most popular Broadway musical of all time… where it turns out she was the hero in a conspiracy with the Scarecrow to pull one over on Dorothy.

To be clear, some of these spinoffs and reimaginings work quite well. Even if I personally am a bit chagrined at Todd Phillips’ Joker being nominated for Best Picture, Joaquin Phoenix’s sad sack killer clown created the space for a riveting performance that reminded mainstream audiences that movies can still be for adults. In another comic book movie, Magneto’s heartbreaking backstory in the Holocaust was expanded in 2011’s X-Men: First Class, which made an already relatively complex supervillain just that much more compelling in Michael Fassbender’s hands.

Overall, however, this approach has left something to be desired. And to get back to Cruella, her remix as a misunderstood tragic heroine appears to owe most of all to Maleficent. In 2014, Disney made a killing when they cast movie star Angelina Jolie as their very best big bad, a character so evil in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty that she was willing to knockoff a princess simply because no one sent her a party invite. That’s cold. And it’s wickedly entertaining. Hence why Maleficent scared and captivated generations of children.

Some characters are just too good at being bad.

The marketing of Maleficent leaned into this with a melancholic cover of Sleeping Beauty’s Tchaikovsky-inspired theme song, “Once Upon a Dream.” Now in a minor key, the new version sung by Lana Del Rey promised a scarier, more menacing version of the story, which was then confirmed by Jolie’s wonderfully devilish laugh. The big bad was finally going to have her day at the ball.

But when the movie actually came out, we learned that Maleficent was an enchanted fairy who’d been wronged. In the end, she didn’t hate Elle Fanning’s Princess Aurora. In fact, she loved the little royal and tried to save her from the curse she herself cast in a fit of justified anger. Ultimately, the sorceress adopts Aurora as the daughter she never had after disposing of her now abusive father. That’s certainly an interpretation. I guess.

It also proved massively successful in the short term, opening at a staggering $175.5 million in its opening weekend worldwide, and grossing $758 million total. Those numbers also exclude merchandising and home video revenues. If you want to know why we’re getting the punk rock Cruella, look no further.

However, did a lot of folks really like Maleficent? It made all the money in the world based on that devious marketing campaign that promised a shocking tell-all about Disney’s closest approximation to Lucifer, but by the time a sequel limped into theater five years later, relatively few seemed to still care about the misunderstood, freedom fighting warrior fairy Jolie played. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil ostensibly continued the good fight but flopped at the box office with a cume of $491.7 million, barely more than half of what its predecessor made. (Don’t cry for Disney though, as Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and remakes of Aladdin and The Lion King in the same year made Maleficent 2 look like a clerical error.)

What this whole sputtering franchise reminds us though is that some characters are better left bad, and the mystique of the unknown is an end unto itself. While I enjoyed Phoenix’s take on the Joker, there is little argument the character was even scarier with a PG-13 rating when he manifested out of thin air, like Beelzebub, in The Dark Knight. Or to take a step away from just villains, was Han Solo really any cooler when you learned how he got his name in Solo: A Star Wars Story? Or could you have gone your whole life without knowing thanks to The Hobbit movies that Gandalf and Galadriel were kind of, sort of, just maybe friends with benefits?

The allure of Cruella De Vil is right there in her name: She’s a cruel devil. How could she not be when her entire ambition in Disney’s classic 101 Dalmatians is to skin puppies for their fur coats? Finding out she used to fight the power before hoarding it may make a lot of money, but it doesn’t make her necessarily more compelling.

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[pardontheglueman]

Glen Campbell - Rhinestone Cowboy

It was the great F. Scott Fitzgerald who, probably after one gin rickey too many at his favourite watering hole, The Willard, famously declared that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’. Fitzgerald, as it turns out, wasn’t much of a fortune teller and his half-baked theory has since been disproved many times over, but for Glen Travis Campbell, pummeling yet another bottle of rum into submission in the backseat of his tour-bus as it snaked through the Australian moonlight, those ominous words must have seemed like his own personal prophesy. Campbell was down on his luck, he hadn’t had a top forty hit since “Dream Baby” in ‘71, his syndicated T.V show with CBS had been pulled from the airwaves in ‘72 and his latest marriage was suddenly on the rocks. He was starting to look like a three-time loser. After all, this was only 1974 and his improbable re-incarnation as the “Rhinestone Cowboy” was still more than a year away.

The first act in Campbell’s remarkable life story, began when he made a name for himself as an ace guitarist with the now legendary Los Angeles musical collective, The Wrecking Crew; a bunch of peerless session musicians who played on scores of landmark recordings throughout the early sixties. Amongst the many milestones were the Righteous Brothers maudlin masterpiece, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”, the Monkees teen-trauma “I’m a Believer” and Sinatra’s semi- swansong, “Strangers in the Night”. Campbell also cemented together more than a few bricks in Phil Spector’s palatial ‘Wall of Sound’ before the rise of the Beatles brought it tumbling down. Undeterred, he clambered onto the Beach Boys pop bandwagon, as the touring stand-in for a world-weary Brian Wilson. In the Kingdom of Pop, that’s tantamount to understudying the Son of God. Campbell remained in the fold when the Messiah returned and stuck around long enough to play bass on the historic Pet Sounds.

Although he’d charted in 1965, with an unlikely cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s pacifist melodrama “Universal Soldier” (Campbell supported the war in Vietnam), it wasn’t until he recorded John Hartford’s Grammy Award-winning “Gentle on my Mind” in 1967 that he truly crashed Pop’s party. He soon forged an improbable relationship with self-avowed hippie Jimmy Webb, who was in the process of penning a succession of magnificent country-pop ballads that would ultimately launch Campbell on the road to international Stardom. “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Galveston” and, of course, “Wichita Lineman” remain pure examples of pop’s incommensurable faculty for loosening the tear ducts.

For a while Campbell was on easy street – a succession of Grammy’s and gold records, T.V shows and Oscar-winning films, followed in his footsteps, but as the Seventies slipped by, the troubadour began to lose his Midas touch. Even Jimmy Webb’s personal goldmine of heart-breaking ballads had panned out – their 1974 collaboration, “Reunion: The Songs of Jimmy Webb”, came up empty in the desperate search for a hit single.

Campbell needed a break and he got one. Jimmy Webb had often remarked on Campbell’s uncanny knack for identifying a sure-fire hit on first hearing and on that three-week tour of Australia he’d kept playing a song over and over again. “Rhinestone Cowboy” had been written and recorded by Larry Weiss, a songwriter trying to pitch his way out of the minor leagues and was brought to Campbell’s attention by producer Dennis Lambert after both Elvis and Neil Diamond had turned it down. The song reached No1 on the Billboard chart in September of 1975 and also topped the Country chart the same week, becoming the first single to achieve the ultimate crossover since 1961, when Jimmy Dean did the double with “Big Bad John”. The album went to the top of the Country chart too, another first for Campbell.

“Rhinestone Cowboy” opens, as the first unwritten law of song sequencing demands, with its second best track. Written especially to reflect Campbell’s parlous state of mind, by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in LA)” may be an over-familiar tale of a farm boy seduced by the big city, but Campbell infuses it with a real sense of self and his ‘on the money’ vocal confirms an unshakeable faith in the songs deeply personal lyric. “Comeback”, another tailor-made ballad by Lambert and Potter allows Campbell to be more philosophical as he stands at the crossroads of life, “I wrote the book on self- preservation / I’m a firm believer in my peace of mind” he sings with a newfound determination to conquer his demons and resurrect his career.

“Count On Me” finds Lambert and Potter and, by extension, Campbell himself in a forgiving frame of mind, as he pledges undying love to the girl who’s broken his heart. Encouraged by Sid Sharp’s gentle strings, and a catchy, full-throated chorus, Campbell somehow summons up an air of genuine nobility in defeat.

Lambert and Potter’s fourth and final contribution, “I Miss You Tonight” is a rather solemn ballad that doesn’t quite get off the runway. The nostalgia feels a little forced here, and even Campbell’s steadfast delivery can’t dispel the air of sluggish melancholia that pervades the song.

Nevertheless, if the album had continued in this soul-searching vein Campbell might have delivered one of pop’s great concept albums, a countrified Astral Weeks, or a star-spangled Blood on The Tracks. The reflective mood, however, is undermined fatally by the inclusion of Smokey Robinson and Ronald White’s soul-standard, ‘My Girl’. Campbell, as one would expect, handles the number in an entirely professional way, but after hearing the irrepressible Otis Redding knock this song clean out of the ballpark I wouldn’t have volunteered to be next up to bat! Despite the accomplished vocal, the end result is no more than a pale imitation of Redding’s classic version. It sounds like someone put a little too much water in the whiskey!

Suit courtesy of Manuel Cuevas AKA the Rhinestone Rembrandt

“Rhinestone Cowboy” is, without doubt, the emotional lodestone of the album. Whilst it might fall short of the unimpeachable ‘Wichita Lineman’, there’s no denying that, under the right circumstances, it can bring a self-pitying tear to the eye and a lump to the throat as you sing along with Campbell on that super-sized chorus –

“Like a rhinestone cowboy / riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo / like a rhinestone cowboy/getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know"..

On paper “Rhinestone Cowboy” seems a hackneyed tale - the travails of a country boy drawn to the bright lights and the big city - however, Campbell has plenty to work within the shape of an insightful, evocative lyric –

“I’ve been walking these streets so long / Singing the same old song / I know every crack in these dirty sidewalks of Broadway / Where hustles the name of the game / And nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain”.

Campbell plays it dead straight and he delivers the ‘western’ lyric with all the poise and purpose of a Shakespearean actor.

Time can be unkind to a certain kind of song, just this kind of song, as a matter of fact. The kind of song sung by a man sporting an ultra-white rhinestone suit, the kind of suit that not even Jay Gatsby in his Cotton Club pomp would ever have dreamed of wearing. “Rhinestone Cowboy”, though, transcends time and place, transcends our sickly obsession with image, transcends its source material, transcends even the supposed wisdom of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a starry-eyed song and my guess is that it will continue to orbit rock ‘n’ roll heaven forever.

No sooner have we reached the album’s highpoint than we’re brought back down to earth with a bump, courtesy of a pair of mundane ballads. “I’d Build a Bridge” is a clichéd love song that left me more than a little queasy before its sorry end, while “Pencils For Sale” is laboured from the word go and not even an outbreak of whistling at the songs close (usually a sign of desperation) can salvage this schmaltzy, underwhelming ballad.

Thankfully, Randy Newman rides like the cavalry to Glen’s rescue. Campbell’s interpretation of “Marie” not only reminds us of what a truly wonderful composer Newman is, but it also serves to remind us just how good a singer Campbell could be when he put his heart and soul into it. Recalling the making of the album for the Guardian in 2013, Dennis Lambert summed it up this way “If we could bring something special to the table, he had the artistry and a name to make it really great”. “Marie” is a testament to that, as is the album’s closer, a cover of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “We’re Over” a scathingly realistic break–up song. Tom Sellers’ arrangement is just the right side of grand and this allows Campbell to give a measured, understated interpretation of a very fine lyric.

As this is the 40th Anniversary Edition, the folks at Capitol have thrown in five bonus tracks for good measure. These include remixes of “Country Boy” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” and more interestingly the quirky “Record Collectors Dream” and, best of all, “Coming Home” a rather likable track that I hadn’t come across before. Released as a single in Japan back in 1975, it has a naively infectious, “Shiny Happy People” feel to it that Campbell wrings every last drop out of –

“Coming home to meet my brother / we’re coming home to one another / we gotta get to know each other now”.

Forty years on, it’s difficult not to see “Rhinestone Cowboy” as something of a missed opportunity. The album’s producers, Lambert and Potter, had a keen sense of the aesthetic environment that would inspire Campbell, that would strike a chord with him and force him to buckle down. However, their quartet of custom-built songs served only to set a standard that the rest of the album failed to live up to. Although the record finishes strongly, with a pair of perfectly realised covers, it’s in the middle section, despite the gigantic presence of “Rhinestone Cowboy” itself, that the album loses its way. With a Mickey Newbury cover here or there, say the heart-rending “ San Francisco Mabel Joy“ or the wistful “Frisco Depot”, “Rhinestone Cowboy” could have been an imaginatively thought through Urban Cowboy concept album (and there aren’t too many of those in anyone’s record collection!) Ultimately, though, Lambert and Potter didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions.