Thought Portal

this video intrigued me so I looked it up and found this interesting review of the film on vulture:

Minus One has no other kaiju but Godzilla, and it takes the monster back to his roots — before that, actually. Whereas the original 1954 Godzilla, a thrilling metaphor for the atomic bomb released just nine years after the end of World War II, takes place in the year it came out, Minus One is set in the immediate aftermath of the war, an era when a demilitarized Japan’s government was in shambles, the cities largely firebombed (or worse) to hell, and its people left searching for new meaning after the disastrous outcome of a war the imperial government started with such ambitious hopes. Japan was at “zero,” and the arrival of Godzilla sets it back to “minus one,” hence the title.

In 2016 Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s memoir of growing up in rural Ohio, became a bestseller in no small part due to the idea that it could “explain” the average Trump voter to liberals who were confused and frightened by his political rise. Now we don’t have time to unpack all the assumptions there (*cough* Trump’s base is in fact just the Republican Party, which skews very strongly middle and upper class *cough*), but it makes all too much sense for that book to become the most Oscar-baiting movie of this year. Hollywood actors, after all, love nothing more than demonstrating their authenticity and skill by playacting at poverty.

And so Hillbilly Elegy the movie has Amy Adams and Glenn Close putting on some of the most extra performances of the year. Amy Adams plays Vance’s drug-addicted mother, while Glenn Close is his tough-love-homespun-wisdom-dispensing grandmother. If this were a parody of condescending poverty porn films, I’m not wholly sure what it would do differently; every performance is keyed to the most hysterical, ridiculous register. If you badly want to understand Appalachians, maybe just talk to a few instead?

A group of men have some feelings, don't know what to do with them, and get everyone around them into a big mess. Sound familiar? We  and the marvelous Clementine Ford discuss Fargo, what we mean when we collectively say "straight men", and the great Marge Gunderson.

You can find Clementine on Instagram here! And here is Big Sister Hotline!

Why Are Dads is a show in which hosts Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed attempt to understand what the hell it means to be the grown children of dads and other dad-like figures. And, as they do with all difficult subject matter, they do so by looking through a pop culture lens.

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You can find producer and music director Carolyn Kendrick's music here. She's also on Twitter.

Fresh Lesh produces the beats for our episodes.

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Yet Gunther’s words here come with a metacinematic resonance. For Stewart Raffill (The Ice Pirates, The Philadelphia Experiment, Mac and Me) was offered, out of the blue, the use of an animatronic tyrannosaur for a specific two-week period, and while the writer/director could sniff opportunity, he had very little time in which to throw together a screenplay that would flesh out this giant moving prop with a plot, with brains, and maybe with the kind of immortality that box office success can bring. Maybe – although Raffill also had enough self-awareness to make Wachenstein’s computer-savvy technician Bobby (John Franklin) quietly dismiss his boss’ grand ambitions with the comment: “What a crock of shit.”

This is the paradox of Tammy and the T-Rex: it is utterly dumb, but smart enough to know just that; and while no gag is too low for its brand of anything-goes screwball, it really does bring a lumbering kind of life to its hybrid collection of ill-fitting ideas. Stitching together elements from ’60s B-movie sci-fi, the high-school movie, the revenge flick, gross-out comedy and the previous year’s Jurassic Park, it comes with a confused identity – confused even more by the surgical excision of some six minutes of blood, guts, gore and profanity for its original US theatrical and home release in a bid to make it appeal more to the family market. In 2019, Vinegar Syndrome restored the unexpurgated version – the so-called ‘Gore Cut’ – whose heroine is credited as ‘Tanny’ and whose title is Tanny & The Teenage T-Rex.

When Ripley is debriefed by her employers at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation over the destruction of the Nostromo in James Cameron’s pitch perfect 1986 sequel Aliens, a vital blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment occurs. The inhumane capitalist firm is skeptical of Ripley’s claims that an Alien killed the ship’s entire crew in the previous film. As they sarcastically dismiss her, short biographies of each of the deceased flash up on a computer screen. Lambert’s bio reads: “Despite conversion at birth from male to female, so far there are no signs of suppressed trauma from gender reassignment.”

Here’s the thing: If Gambit feels familiar immediately, this is no accident. The show deploys the heavyweights of storytelling tropes as it follows the comforting trajectory of the hero’s journey. It’s the fairy-tale structure you know: Here’s the orphan origin story trope; there’s the wise mentor trope. The show adheres closely to the rule of threes — Beth has three coaches who get close to her, she has three women who act as mothers and protectors, and she confronts her most fearsome opponent as many times, too.

But while the show is familiar, it’s also aware it’s landing in an environment where audience expectations are so shaped by trauma, and it has its fun with those expectations. Trauma is central to this moment in prestige TV, whether in comedies like Fleabag or dramas like Chernobyl. This, of course, is not a problem per se: Exploring the ways our painful past shapes us is meaningful heavy lifting for art to take on. It’s just that I’ve come to associate award-contender TV with deep-seated damage. I watch TV shows bracing for the worst.

Gambit deftly sets up scenes to suggest they’ll go one way before pivoting in another. The creepy basement stairs do not lead to death. The unsettling glance of an older man does not end in sexual assault. I’ve been so trained by the last five years of TV to anticipate bad things happening that I found myself gleeful at how Gambit builds then dissipates my anticipatory dread.

That’s not to say the scars aren’t there — Beth has gone through ample anguish, but her wounds do not define her. The pain is not dwarfed, nor is it in bold type. It is there in flashbacks and in between triumphs. It pops up in her highs and lows. On occasion, it is there in the choices she makes, the same way it is there for you and me. Beth is damaged and functional, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, but never only broken, never only an orphan, never only someone dealing with addiction.

Won't somebody please write a poem about how sexy it is that I am dying of a disease?? Come with me on a journey through the costume design in Crimson Peak, and how an epidemic shaped the fashion of the Victorian Era.

This season is based in large part on Polly Platt's unpublished memoir, It Was Worth It, excerpted with the permission of Sashy Bodganovich.

Disney Plus is launching with the stated intention of streaming the entire Disney library...except for Song of the South, the 1946 animation/live-action hybrid film set on a post-Civil War plantation, which was theatrically re-released as recently as 1986, served as the basis for the ride Splash Mountain, but has never been available in the US on home video. What is Song of the South, why did Disney make it, and why have they held the actual film from release, while finding other ways to profit off of it? Across six episodes of our new season, we’ll dig into all facets of Song of the South’s strange story. Join us, won’t you?

Because this country, and Hollywood most of all, has learned nothing from the 2016 election, Best of Enemies will juxtapose these two people--and by extension, their communities--as simply two extremes who learn to see each other’s points of view and meet each other halfway. The rules for choosing the voting members who will participate on the debate teams are that Ann and Ellis can't choose for the teams they are leading any “Black Power” people like her, nor any Klansmen like Ellis.

There’s also scenes of Atwater discussing her hatred for Ellis and being chastised and shamed for it, as if to suggest that their hatred were equal. For years, every time Atwater would go to public city council meetings to get problems fixed for struggling, poor Black people, Ellis would be there with the Klan to shut them down. During the 1971 debate, Ellis introduced apartheid-level ideas for how Black people should be treated in Durham and Atwater pulled out a knife. Ellis brought out a machine gun.

While Atwater hated white supremacy and its agents for preventing her, her children and her community from having access to basic resources, Ellis’ motivations, as he told the Herald-Sun in 1999, were simply: "When I joined the Klan, I thought every Black person in the country was evil and dirty. I just assumed it.” But sure, let’s paint them as “equally hateful.”

The 1958 version of The Fly famously ends with the troubled scientist stuck in a spider’s web with his tiny fly body and human head, plaintively crying, “Help me! Help me!” The spider advances, and the scientist’s voice is too thin to be heard by human ears. It’s the first time I remember being truly terrified by a film — not by the shambling monsters, but by invisibility and inconsequence. By erasure.

What I've been frustrated by is not just the commodification of feminism, though I find that pretty soul-crushing. It's that packaging feminist ideas so neatly can feel, to me, like an expression of the desire to skip past so much of the significant, systemic work to be done and go straight to the commemorative T-shirt — or the cloying documentary portrait, the feel-good biopic, the star-packed remake. I can't relate to that, and at the same time I'm tired of the idea that we need to relitigate the worth of art and entertainment by women, about women, for women, again and again.

It’s almost as if the film is afraid of making audiences uncomfortable with the reality of queer pain, and as if, from beginning to end, Mercury’s life was most meaningful in terms of what he meant to his family and to the band, rather than what he meant to himself.

Two creators I really love are interviewed by kinda douchey hosts on two separate podcasts that I listened to in the same week.

133: Karina's Pix (with Karina Longworth) PCWC - False Knees

...“The Disaster Artist” attempts to position Wiseau as an underdog, that awkward kid no one believes in but overcomes obstacles in his own way and succeeds against all odds. But how can Wiseau be an underdog when he can pay to make his own film? How many awkward marginalized people can buy their way into an industry when they are explicitly told no? How many victims of sexual assault had the capability to buy their own parts when powerful abusers were edging them out of the industry?...

These are all the reasons I love Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette