venusinmyrrh

[venusinmyrrh]

alright guys who’s gonna save me, call me baby, and run their hands through my hair?

[venusinmyrrh]

RHYS IFANS in THE BOAT THAT ROCKED | PIRATE RADIO (2009)

[venusinmyrrh]

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

[venusinmyrrh]

The Three Fates - Alexander Rothaug (details) // When the Chips are Down from Hadestown

[venusinmyrrh]

ever since i was a little girl i wanted to experience being taken away by my fated vampire lover

[venusinmyrrh]

Reblogging for @bluestockingbaby’s tag!

My favorite new (or new to me) films of 2024!

Conclave, dir. Edward Berger

Monkey Man, dir. Dev Patel

Waitress, dir. Adrienne Shelly

Nosferatu, dir. Robert Eggers

The Bikeriders, dir. Jeff Nichols

Emilia Pérez, dir. Jacques Audiard

Strange Way of Life, dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Gladiator II, dir. Ridley Scott

The Fall Guy, dir. David Leitch

Honorable mention:

Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino

Lisa Frankenstein, dir. Zelda Williams

Wicked, dir. Jon M. Chu

[venusinmyrrh]

#were it not for the laws of this land i would be most dangerous game-ing tourists DAILY.#especially the ones who come here and bitch incessantly about how much they hated it because they expected disney’s hollywood studios#and not an actual real city where real people live and work.

very true and real tags about Los Angeles (from @mordredsheart)

[venusinmyrrh]

Christmas tree on top of the Capitol Records building

(J.R. Eyerman. n.d.)

[venusinmyrrh]

I am what God made me. And perhaps it is my difference that will make me useful. I think again of your sermon. I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.

CONCLAVE (2024)

[venusinmyrrh]

My favorite new (or new to me) books of 2024!

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Fragrant by Mandy Aftel

Fosse by Sam Wasson

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies by Molly Haskell

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice writing as A. N. Roquelaure

Virgin Whore by Emma Maggie Solberg

Honorable mention:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Evocation by ST Gibson

Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart

Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed by Simon Doonan

[venusinmyrrh]

My favorite new (or new to me) films of 2024!

Conclave, dir. Edward Berger

Monkey Man, dir. Dev Patel

Waitress, dir. Adrienne Shelly

Nosferatu, dir. Robert Eggers

The Bikeriders, dir. Jeff Nichols

Emilia Pérez, dir. Jacques Audiard

Strange Way of Life, dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Gladiator II, dir. Ridley Scott

The Fall Guy, dir. David Leitch

Honorable mention:

Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino

Lisa Frankenstein, dir. Zelda Williams

Wicked, dir. Jon M. Chu

[venusinmyrrh]

there is no possible way the force awakens can be 10 years old this year because it was actually fucking yesterday that @venusinmyrrh and i spent the afternoon at artegon and went to gods and monsters before heading to the orlando citywalk AMC and having our entire molecular structures altered when we laid eyes on those beautiful rabid animals cosplaying the empire

[venusinmyrrh]

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[venusinmyrrh]

Nixe’s Top 10 Films Of 2024!

in chronological viewing order, including both new and new-to-me films from this year.

03. Monkey Man

Only God can forgive you now.

It would have been enough for me if Dev Patel had made a super-polished, super-tight action movie that looks great and has some awesome fight scenes, with characters fleshed out far and away beyond what’s typical of the genre these days (a courtesy extended even to the protagonist’s mother, beyond mere tragic backstory). And he did that! Which is doubly impressive, considering what an ordeal it was to get this movie made and put out into the world. But what elevates Monkey Man and made it stick with me all year long were the themes of how religion is used by both the oppressors and the oppressed, and the alarm it raises loud and clear against the rise of religious fascism.

You see scars. I see the courage of a child fighting to save his mother. These are the hands of a warrior, who is destined to challenge the gods.

On the one hand, throughout the story, religion is a balm to the excluded and the suffering. As a child, Kid delighted in his mother’s stories of Hanuman, a Hindu monkey deity, who is known among other things as “remover of obstacles” and “healer of sorrows.” After his village is destroyed - an eviction, because it was largely populated by a religious minority, that became a massacre - and his mother murdered, Kid takes his image from Hanuman for his day (night?) job as a fighter in a grimy underground ring. And, after all has seemed to go wrong in Kid’s quest for revenge (a quest never equivocated on, or portrayed as wrong-headed), it’s through Hanuman again that he finds the strength to fight on.

Kid gets that second wind while sheltering with hijra at a remote temple in the forest. (Alpha, the temple keeper, assures him that the police won’t come looking for him there because they find the hijra “too unsettling.”) Although driven into this exile from society, in their own community, in their own temple and in their devotion to Ardhanarishvara, called “the Lord who is half woman”, the hijra are free, happy, and safe. Alpha is also the one who pulls Kid through his dark night of the soul and reminds him that he must keep on fighting, for his own sake and for the sake of all the marginalized people who have been hurt, too. (But don’t think the hijra are politely excused from the revenge narrative: they get to join Kid for the climactic fight, as well.)

(Anger will not quiet your soul, my son.) Don’t call me son.

So we come to the other hand: the religion of the oppressors. One of the major antagonists, Baba Shakti, is a Hindu nationalist who targets the hijra and their temple and was also responsible for the eviction/massacre in Kid’s village. He speaks, by turns, in condescending platitudes and hyperconservative fury, dodging interviewers’ questions about his shady business practices and whipping up us-against-them hatred at political rallies. The corrupt cop who follows Baba Shakti’s command is the more personal enemy for Kid - and the dynamic is a great illustration of what happens when the state becomes a tool of religion, and vice versa - but make no mistake, the guru is the face of oppression through and through.

Monkey Man’s refusal to pull its punches on this front got a disappointing but not surprising response: to date, the film hasn’t been released in India, due to what Siddhant Adlakha called “the specter of Hindutva blowback.” With different flavors of religious fascism on the rise around the world, I worry that movies like Monkey Man will become rarer and rarer, if not due to active government-authorized censorship, then because studios will simply prove unwilling to take the financial gamble on anything remotely “controversial,” anything that might comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. As Monkey Man proves, though, the afflicted will not be swept off this planet easily, no matter how uncomfortable it’s made for them.

[venusinmyrrh]

Olivia Hussey, who dazzled moviegoers as the female star of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1969 fabled adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, died Thursday. She was 73.

Hussey died “at home surrounded by her loved ones,” according to an announcement on her official Instagram account. “Olivia was a remarkable person whose warmth, wisdom, and pure kindness touched the lives of all who knew her.”

Hussey was just 16 when she starred opposite Leonard Whiting as Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, directed and co-written by Zeffirelli. The Paramount film was nominated for the best picture Oscar and three other Academy Awards.

Hussey also worked with the Italian director with a turn as Mary in the 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and appeared in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1978), directed by John Guillermin, and Black Christmas (1974), the cult slasher horror movie.

More recently, she has worked as a voice actress in Star Wars video games, including 1998’s Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, 2000’s Star Wars: Force Commander and 2011’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.

[venusinmyrrh]

nosferatu? non. VOSferatu. c'est pas mon problème

[venusinmyrrh]

GLADIATOR II 2024 — dir. Ridley Scott