thinking about writing overlapping timelines, but specifically for the screen where you have to reuse old footage for half of the production. it adds such an interesting constraint to the way the story is told because all modifications have to be made within the new footage.

The new character has to consistently duck out of view of the old. If it wasn't planned in advance, you've got to very cleverly write out how little things from the old footage could impact the new footage. You can have the new character nod back to the old, but you can't do anything about the old one influencing the new.

it's just a lot of intricate careful planning and a very intriguing description that i'd quite like to play around with.

The Cishet 1990s American Father-Son Movie, Good Omens triggered.

For those who are confused, @howmanyholesinswisscheese made a heartbreaking Good Omens post. Read it and weep.

The reblogs however degenerated into a Cishet Father-Son saga, since you maggots are all my adoptive parents. Here is a more polished version of my latest contribution to the hellsite.

[Opening credits play over highly saturated, sundrenched midwest farmland. Bob Dylan's Sara plays and the title appears as the camera slows to a halt in front of a sprawling house.]

[TITLE: Farewell, Iowa, We'll Meet Again, a Gus Van Sant film]

Art 'Greeny' Matthews, a man who does an honest day's work in the farm and is pretty darn proud of it, wanders through his house. His wife Darlene just left him (hence the opening song), and he is faced with the prospect of raising his only son, a ten year old lad Asmond 'Mond' Matthews, on his own.

Greeny takes Mond along with him as he works in the farm on holidays, riding in the tractor. Mond cries about Darlene, who didn't even leave a note, the hussy, and Greeny comforts him as much as he can. "It'll be alright, son," Greeny says on Mond's eleventh birthday, as they sit in the stable with a badly made cake on the wobbly stool. "Just you and me, eh? Not bad!"

"I hate chocolate," Mond whispers miserably, and the birthday party ends in more tears.

When Mond is thirteen, he starts to grow more closed with his emotions, just helping his dad around the farm. They're making a huge profit, and Greeny has business deals and free time, and makes an effort to bring Mond along to golf games and such. Mond is being bullied in school for being caught writing poetry, but he refuses to tell his dad why he comes home with a black eye every other week.

"I'm always here if you want to talk over a game of catch, son," Greeny tries one day. "No thanks, dad," Mond says, and wanders away into the stable. At fourteen, Greeny tries to bring him on fishing trips to discuss his feelings, as they used to do back when Darlene lived with them. Mond swallows, but shakes his head.

Finally, Mond can't keep it from him anymore, and when Greeny finds out, he goes into a rare fit of temper. "Just like your mother, boy!" he says, hand rattling his mug of ale. "A wanderer and a careless fool, that's what you'll turn out to be! There ain't no place in this world for people livin' in their heads."

Mond doesn't write poetry anymore.

As Mond grows, though, he helps out more with the farm, and they bond over hopes for future profit, and joking about golf, which they both find pretentious. "C'mon, champ, let's go play golf," Greeny says while they watch suited businessmen make their way to the house, out of place amidst the yellow-green farmland. "What's your favourite golf club?"

"That a literal club, or the thing they whack the ball with, dad?" Mond responds, and Greeny chortles. "I taught you better than that, son."

He has high hopes for Mond, he will take over the farm. Greeny is growing weary of his duties, he married late and had Mond even later.

[Montages of sunlight days ensue, intercut with shots of Mond, who always has a melancholic air about him. His mother was a dancer, and that rebellious spirit, so long dormant, is beginning to stir as he enters his twenties.]

On his twenty-first birthday, Greeny has baked him a cake, not chocolate. Mond barely sees it. His father doesn't know him. Not really. Not at all. When Greeny says he is handing over the farm to him, and starts to give him instructions about the responsibilities, Mond has had it.

He picks up the rucksack he's been storing by the umbrella stand for weeks, and shoulders it as Greeny pauses mid-lecture. "I'm sorry, dad," Mond says. "I'm going away to be my own man. This was your dream. Not mine."

Greeny is too frozen to stop him.

[Knockin' on Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan plays with another montage]

Mond travels the States, far from home and Iowa, and after a year of struggle finally publishes his first anthology of poetry. Hoping to make his dad proud, he sends a letter home asking if it imperative he return, since he's too ashamed to say he wants to. The reply is a brief but polite no from the housekeeper, saying his father wishes him well but does not require that he return. Assuming Greeny wants nothing to do with him, Mond stays away, bitter and homesick.

He is called home a few months later, and when he arrives, he is met not with Greeny, but with the housemaids and farmhands in black, and the housekeeper teary-eyed as she guides him to the back garden and a lonely gravestone. Greeny, heartbroken by his son leaving the same way Darlene his wife did all those years ago, declined in health, but he kept up the farm till the end, all ready for Mond should he want it after all, and for the head farmer if he didn't.

Mond, still carrying his book hoping to have shown his dad at last, stares in shock at the gravestone. He thinks even at the end Greeny did not know him, thought he would want the farm. Until he reads the inscription. Art 'Greeny' Matthews, friend to all, loyal husband, and most of all, proud father of a poet.

His father knew, Mond realised. His father knew what he'd been doing.

"Are ya proud, dad?" Mond whispers, dropping the book and kneeling down before the stone. "Are ya proud? It was all for you."

[The camera pulls back to show the farmland, scattered with people in black going about their work because business stops for no one, and a solitary figure by the gravestone. Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind plays as the end credits roll.]

"How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand?"

The end.

@howmanyholesinswisscheese The challenge has been issued.

got tagged in a year-end "best film writing" list on Twitter for my essay on Sean Baker's Tangerine, Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and the subversion of the "road movie" genre in queer American cinema, so I figured I'd post it again here for anyone who missed it!

ok so i really wanna write a screenplay about my summer. i think it’d make a really good queer indie film. i’m more a visual person but i hate writing scripts. i might just make it a short story or novella first, but i think i am on to something. there’s too much creative energy flowing through me, i’ve been wanting to focus and write it for a while now.

the premise is two gay guys in the south and their following romance. i’m not sure how much i want it to be autobiographical. id say about 50% of it will be true or based on the truth. the details surrounding their personal lives aren’t too important. there will be character 1 & 2 and they are the primary focus. there might be a friend for the bear and the ex for the twink that will get some coverage. family for twink. maybe just sister for bear.

but the first scene of the film, the shot will see the ocean and then go down to a young blond twink eating at a hotel restaurant on the coast. hell be looking pensive then his older boyfriend will come to the table and greet him. like sugar daddy vibes. then it will be a flashback to the summer.

it will have the two gay guys — one a twink and one a bear — falling in love in the lower middle class / middle class urban south. there will be drug use, id specifically like to have mathematics in a scene or two. i know there’s not a lot of that in media and it also is common in the gay population in a way i think straights don’t realize. i know it’s not exactly palpable for the public, but it’s so common especially in the south, i think it needs its moment in the spotlight. i’ve considered just having molly or cocaine or maybe even LSD. G should also have a mention cuz that’s another gay culture drug. poppers are definitely a must. all that could be considered. but i think it deserves a mathematics scene.

there will be at least one scene of domestic violence. that would probably be the climax of the film. it doesn’t have to be graphic, but hey im not throwing that out the window either. it could stay true to the dull, slow indie rhythm. as long as there is an emotional intensity surrounding it. maybe a bloody nose at least.

i don’t want too many details about the boyfriend twink is with in the opening scene. but there might be a scene where he is in california about 1/4 into the movie, so the viewer remembers it’s a flashback. twink could just be walking around LA though. maybe a scene in SF where he kisses new boyfriend sugar daddy vibes.

and there should probably be a good sex scene or two. again, not enough bear - twink combo in media. the bear / twink combo is important cuz that’s not seen enough of.

that’s all i’ve got for now.

twink will just be exiting an unsatisfying relationship, (partner accidentally had sex with twink’s father), + he gets his onlyfans deleted. so bear is new summer romance. but then it gets ugly. i want the twink’s lack of finances to be emphasized. but also his work ethic.

but i want the viewers to fall in love with the characters like they are with them, falling in love with them. i want it to be heart wrenching, and believable. i want the viewers to feel the emotions of the actors.

The Curse of the Main Character

Main characters. They’re the best, aren’t they? Except they’re not. Think of who your favourite character is from any number of pieces of entertainment media.

If you loved Lord of the Rings, it’s likely Frodo wasn’t your favourite character. No, it was probably Sam, Éowyn, Pippin, etc. Or maybe you prefer Star Wars, but let’s face it: Han and Leia were always more interesting than Luke.

Or perhaps you’re more into the MCU and side characters that never got their own solo stories like Natasha/Black Widow were your favourite, up until she got her own movie. Then she mysteriously fell into the same vat of main character blandness that Steve, Tony, etc had fallen prey to before. And now her sister Yelena was the side character stealing the show, like Natasha once was.

Hell, maybe you were a Nickelodeon kid who watched Victorious and adored Jade and Kat, but despised Tori due to the crime that she simply wasn’t as interesting or fun.

See, in any given story, (in my experience) your favourite characters are the ones that have the luxury of not being imprinted on by the author and thus are able to fully develop into more interesting beings with flaws and strengths that have nothing to do with the creator’s own personal perception of what it would look like for them specifically to be the protagonist. Or rather, how the creator(s) assumes the viewer/player/reader/etc would relate to their protagonist. Instead of just writing a character that would actually be effective within the context of the story.

I’m dubbing this phenom the Main Character Curse. It applies to so many different forms of media. Think of your favourite romance novel series such as Immortals After Dark or even Addicted/Calloway Sisters, in which every instalment is a standalone story in the same world and each book focuses on a new couple. Now, which book in that series is your favourite? Because I can almost guarantee it’s not the first book.

The first book that focuses so heavily on the couple that was clearly meant to be the magnum opus of greatness but fell short compared to almost every other book/couple in the series. Due to the fact that other characters in the series had to earn their stories. The couple from the first book didn’t need to be interesting or even particularly likeable. They just needed to be two people the author could fantasize about.

Whereas all of those other side characters in the first book had to earn their right to sequels and spin-offs by being the funniest, meanest, smartest, most fun, etc. They needed to prove themselves to the reader, when the protagonist did not.

Main characters don’t have to do anything (as of the writing of the story) to be worthy of being protagonists of said story. However, side characters have to earn their place in the story by actually serving the plot or developing in a meaningful way themselves.

The protagonist just needs to be a vessel for the consumer, no matter how dull or bland that vessel may be. Any other character in that same story has to be important or impactful in some way. Thus, they have the ability to develop, grow, shrink, or change drastically without it affecting the story to the point that it shifts away from the original plot-line completely.

Because even if that character dies or changes completely, the story will go on. The same cannot be said of the main character. Who has to be relatively stable and grounded enough throughout the whole story to remain the conduit for the reader/viewer/player/etc.

The side character has the luxury of being untethered to expectation and thus their journey is only limited to whatever the plot can throw at them.

So, why is the main character that way to begin with? The simple answer: the author can’t help but want to be the main character themselves, so they put too much of themselves into that character. Which limits what that protagonist experiences to what the writer themselves can relate to.

Which then immediately restricts the protagonist to a rigid box of typical self-insert godliness, or worse: boringness. Which is also likely why so many heroes/heroines seem too similar to cringy fanfic Y/N for comfort.

I know when I was around twelve years old I got the Divergent trilogy boxed set, and I noticed something a little odd. In the first book, the heroine Tris has long hair, and lo and behold; the author in the photo at the back of the book had the exact same hair style. Then, in the second book the heroine cuts her hair short, and oh! The author so happened to now have the exact same haircut in her updated author photo at the end of the book. The heroine’s hair changes a little bit again by book three, and (shocker) so does the author’s hair.

It’s almost like the creator was projecting onto the protagonist and accidentally constructed and ultimately hindered her main character in the process.

Are there circumstances where this doesn’t happen? Absolutely, but they are few and far between. Protagonists such as Percy Jackson and Aelin Galathynius prove that the main character of a story can be the best character in that same story.

However, these protagonists are few and far between, and we definitely need more of them. Though as stated above, this is complicated and difficult for a multitude of reasons.

Perhaps a temporary goal is to feature multiple main characters at once with no clear outlier, such as the Umbrella Academy. That remedies the issue of the protagonist being a typical hero/heroine by making every main character weird, strange, and fully fleshed out.

Or the Legend of Vox Machina. Which also has no definitive main character, because it has the unique luxury of originating from a tabletop RPG campaign in which every character was role-played by a different individual who was trying to be the main character in their own distinct and original way.

A different twist on the multiple protagonist approach involves something like what The Boys tv show does. Which highlights Billy, Hughie and Homelander as main characters, but gives plenty of other characters the main character spotlight during various different story arcs and episodes.

Regardless, sometimes I just want a story that has a single definitive protagonist. And every once in a while I’ll stumble upon an absolute treasure of a story, like Ted Lasso. In which the main character is amazingly written and portrayed, but all the secondary and tertiary characters are every bit as likeable and riveting.

Because it is so rewarding when stories can fully deliver on every bit of their potential instead of leaving you wishing they fulfilled what they teased.

All in all, I want less writers to live vicariously through their protagonists, and more writers to consider writing more bravely, oddly and complexly. Even if that means their protagonist isn’t the most beautiful or powerful or special.

Because no matter what, I’ll take a character that is the most likeable or interesting over the character that is the most special, any day. What about you? Let me know your thoughts!

“The eyes on promotional posters and videocassette boxes are in the great majority of cases threatened, frightened eyes--commonly a woman’s eyes reaching in horror at a poised, bloody knife, an advancing shape, or something off-poster or off-box. ‘One of the most frequent and compelling images in the horror film repertoire,’ writes J.P. Telotte, ‘is that of the wide, staring eyes of some victim, expressing stark terror or disbelief and attesting to an ultimate threat to the human proposition.’ A standard moment in horror is one in which a person is caught by surprise--her vision assaulted--by the sight of things she does not want to see. Laurie in Halloween, for example, who looks into a closet only to see the dead body of her friend staring her in the face. And as Telotte points out, the effect is maximized by the reversal of the normal sequence in such a way that the reaction comes first. Over and over, horror presents us with scenarios in which assaultive gazing is not just thwarted and punished, but actually reversed in such a way that those who thought to penetrate end up themselves penetrated.”

--Carol J. Clover, from Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992)

Dune (2021) was 1.) top-notch, from someone who hasn’t read any of the books and 2.) something I sincerely wish I had caught on a large-format screen. Its color palate is so bleak for a movie shot in color, that maybe they should have tried a black and white cut for the hell of it.

That being said, its stirring visuals are its “weakest”point; Dune could not have asked more of its cast or of Villeneuve. Personally, I wasn’t engrossed in the story on a first watch, but everything else makes for a pretty solid viewing experience.

Also, props to the guy on Letterboxd who referred to the infamous sandworm as “The Forbidden Butthole.” Now I can’t take those dry, chapped monsters seriously.

what's a movie that makes you cry no matter how many times you watch it?

BFI Flare: Horseplay

A group of straight Argentinean men hang out in a beautiful home with barely any clothes on, while playing pranks on each other and sending compromising pictures to various WhatsApp groups.

The supposedly decades long bond between these characters is totally unsketched outside of their apparent need to test each others' sexual boundaries. The film therefore functions only as a homosexual fantasy of what straight male bonding looks like, while purporting to levy the critique that – shock! – there may be a homophobic streak latent within their homoerotic horseplay.

That this is the most simplistic possible thought on the subject does not stop the film taking two hours to make its point. And that the Gay Viewers' arousal at this implicitly homophobic milieu is the sole source of the films libidinal quality – and marketable appeal – goes lamentably unaddressed.

The mens' interactions are well observed in places, but the film is largely dull and dishonest, and aims to horn up its audience into looking past the redundancy of its content.

hi! i'm nicole, lady film writer & madonna scholar & blond blogger about town and these are some of my writings 🎀 all of my feminist film essays and posts r 100% free on substack and i publish a new piece weekly so consider subscribing! below some links <3 #BRINGBACKBLOGGING

Sex "Pistol"s Show: Female Representation & Why I Hate Vivienne Westwood

🎀 Feminist Films vs. "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

💝 5 Short Films I Recommend

the horrors of making movies as a schoolgirl 🎀

Barbie Breakfasts in Gregg Araki’s "The Living End" (1992) 🎀💝

i still have the end of my script so clearly in my head. i wish i could figure out the fucking rest of it BEFORE the ending happens. jesus christ.

Three Films and a Couple of Thoughts

22.07.23 - 10.08.23

My phone calendar for July was not just marked with bill payments and birthdays but also the release dates of three films, complete with an accompanying reminder that would inevitably light the screen, catch my attention, ensure that I was booking the tickets in time. The films were ‘Past Lives’, ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’. I watched all three of them with my partner, my usual film companion if I’m not watching something with our parents or you, and each of these experiences – Past Lives, 6.05PM show at INOX, Oppenheimer, 11.55PM show at Cinepolis and Barbie, 12pm noon show at PVR – was singular in its own way, for a myriad of reasons.

Notwithstanding the absurdly high prices of tickets where a Rs. 350 ticket starts to look ‘cheap’ (to me, the upper-middle class consumer, with enough liquidity to throw cash even at a coca cola priced at Rs. 360!!), what was it like to watch each of these films in the cinema? Let’s also not forget that all three of these films are, to varying degrees, in English or English-centric (since Past Lives is a mix of Korean and English, subtitled only in English), the implication being that the audiences for all of these will be English-understanding, if not English speaking etc. I think it’s important to note all of these things – the cost, the language, the space of the cinema itself – in the present moment, before diving into the ‘criticism’ / ‘opinion’ portion of my piece. The subtext of all this is: how communal of an experience does the cinema still provide? Who can afford the obnoxiously priced snacks and the reclining seats, let alone the ticket itself? Who has the ‘time’ to luxuriously book a noon time show, in the middle of a work day, or one late at night in a city like Delhi? With the rapidly intensifying need to show more and more ‘content’, as made obvious by the number of screens in a particular cinema ‘complex’ (no longer hall, no longer single screen), the question that also comes to mind is this: is consumption everything?

When I watched the trailer for Past Lives, I felt an appreciative nervousness that seems to be evoked by nearly all A24 films; the subtle promise that this movie, this narrative will shift the way you might think or feel things. After all, a film about a Korean-American woman, married to a white guy, who then runs into her childhood sweetheart, is a film that can open so many doors, invite so many questions, evoke that complex sense of yearning and uncertainty, while attaching it to memory-making and the politics of identity. So I went into the hall with this promise in mind, expecting a complex and touching narrative about love, identity, history…but by the first half, it was beginning to seem that I had expected too much. In the interval, when my partner and I stepped out to get popcorn, we exchanged only sceptical glances and no words, both perhaps trying to let the film run its course, refusing an early judgement or indictment, generous to a fault.

Past Lives is one of the most disappointing films I have ever had to watch in the cinema. Not only did I nearly fall asleep twice in the first half, the gaping holes in plot and the sheer lack of any chemistry, or depth in any of the relationships made me want to pull my hair out. The film seemed to think that unnervingly long, awkward-without-purpose silences between characters is all that a context of tenderness requires – this particular choice irked me throughout. Our protagonist meets her childhood crush repeatedly over the course of 20-30 years, after gaps that are decades long and their conversation amounts to this: did you eat anything today? – UNNECESSARY FORCED SILENCE -  What prize do you want to win for your writing now? – UNNECESSARY FORCED SILENCE - Do you and your partner fight?  - UNNECESSARY FORCED SILENCE – and so on and so forth. If in these year long intervals, they have gained no curiosity about each other nor the ability to hold a single engaging conversation, then perhaps they should stop pretending they’re in love. The absurdity does not stop here, with the pretend-serious quiet that forces the film into disfigured drivel, but extends to all other aspects of the film – the protagonist has a younger sister and a pair of parents mentioned only once in the film, never to reappear or be mentioned onscreen again, the protagonist is a writer who stops talking to her crush the first time round because she wants to write but we never get to see what she’s writing, or what her work life is like or anything ‘writerly’ at all, the protagonist meets her white husband at a retreat and the ONLY conversation they have is where she monologues in the most dry, unaffected manner about ‘in-yeon’, a seemingly ‘deep’ concept that gives literally no weight to the film but seems to be its alleged driving force, before we drift into their marriage that has, again, no depth, feeling, tension, nothing, and in one particularly galling scene when the protagonist invites her childhood crush to a dinner/bar scene with her husband, the two of them start out talking in Korean with her translating into English for her husband before descending entirely into Korean, excluding the husband from the exchange which is mirrored literally by the camera cutting him out the frame. Not only is this absolutely, unfathomably unreal and stupid, they also manage to discuss what a ‘life together’ might have been like….right there, with the ousted white guy sitting somewhere within earshot. How has this not come up before, you know, when they met like 5-6 times alone? How can anybody take their spouse out with an erstwhile crush/flame and proceed to ignore said spouse for hours on end, without any ramifications? How is the said spouse not even hurt a tiny bit? What is the logic of this film? What is the meaning of this film? Is it enough only to put one ‘deep’ Korean concept in, fill the run time with awful, hankering silences and characters that appear to be more cardboard than real people, and put some stringy-ambient music in the background – in order to make an ‘art’ film, a ‘stunning’ cinematic debut?

I call bullshit.

At the end of the film, my partner and I turned to each other and both of us said….WHAT? IS THAT IT? IS THAT WHAT WE PAID SO MUCH MONEY FOR, AND GAVE OUR TIME TO? It was in a senseless, almost slurring kind of disbelief that we walked back home, unable to articulate how awful the film really was, especially because it pretended so hard not to be anything but ‘touching’ and ‘simmering’ and ‘beautiful’? When we pulled out reviews of the film, the disbelief sky-rocketed to another level. Past Lives was a critically acclaimed film, by the measure of most, if not nearly all reviews. We kept shaking our heads, wondering if we’d watched another film, the wrong cut, or if we were just stupid. Was there something we didn’t understand? Were we the ones missing something, and not the film itself? After all, in varying publications and across platforms, it was being hailed as a ‘masterpiece’. And the only words we had for it were: bull-fucking-shit.

.

Oppenheimer was a midnight show, and we were running late, having had to look for parking and the cinema itself - of course we would arrive at the wrong shopping mall first. We missed the first five-seven minutes of the film, but got settled in quickly. A fair amount of time has elapsed since I watched the film so my thoughts aren't quite as dense or immediate - it was an interesting movie overall, with a number of elements that faltered and misspoke. Here's what I liked: the impeccable sound design, often a 'staple' of Nolan's films, the 'character' of Albert Einstein (perhaps acted too perfectly, in my opinion, a portrayal that teetered on the edge of whimsy but never became a caricature?), Cillian fucking Murphy making the most of a script that didn't fully grasp or even attempt to grasp the complexities of Oppenheimer's life or the bomb dropping itself, the popping up of random actors - though after a time, it became a bit tedious. Hello, Rami Malek, is that all you'll be saying?

It's also indicative that the cinema was predominantly 'male', full of tech bros and cishet men that had turned out en masse to rave about Nolan - I am late to the discourse surrounding his films and the women portrayed in them (awfully, poorly, tediously, repetitively awful etc etc) but of course that was one of my major issues with the film. Plenty of reviews about this. I remain unconvinced by a film that leaads up so heavily to a world-history changing bombing but refuses to show us even ONE visual of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's not enough to show us this singular white man's 'guilt' (very sparsely, might I add) - for a film made in this day and age, it certainly doesn't seem to want to reckon with the sheer scale of violence this moment unleashed upon the world. To be preoccupied with 'Oppenheimer' is a lazier, easier choice and still the film meanders in the second half, a little too obsessed with the trial / American politics, rather than the absolutely real time ramifications of the bomb. The film seems almost forgiving, when it should perhaps adopt a more complex approach to Oppenheimer. Don't even start me on the women - that's a whole other shit show. Literally nothing works in that realm, not for even a second, is any woman onscreen remotely believable or real, or even realized as a person. So Nolan has bumbled a number of things in the film - in parts, the film felt likes three different films put together, the editing was quite poor and abrupt, the women utterly destroyed in favour of a boring trial and an all-too-easily-forgiven antagonist, without a moment taken to acknowledge the horror he brought upon the world through his world. Underwhelming and not well thought out, I'd say but I really enjoyed the way sound functioned throughout film. For those raving about the 'cinematography' or 'visuals' - friends, come on, it's alright, it's pretty standard. Some things do strike you but overall, it's just alright.

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We were on time for Barbie. What a relief. After watching three films with missing beginnings (these two above, and even the new Spiderman film!), I was relieved to see WB ads playing out on the big screen. My partner was very sorry that neither of us were wearing pink - the cinema hall was flushed in said colour, mostly, and I liked how 'extra' it felt, almost exuberant? But at the same time, the company making Barbies now making films about barbies - do we get more meta in capitalism than this? Probably. But that subtext stayed with me.

On first thought, right at the first watch, I really enjoyed the film. I laughed a lot, and I laughed at how much my partner laughed because some of the humour really worked well. Funnily enough and like a small majority, Ken emerged as my favourite character over the course of the film. The production design and the music was very well done most of the time, and some of the writing was very crisp, very intelligent. There were some issues though - many of which emerged in my conversations with other viewers, as well as my partner, as we read through internet discourse, reviews, tweets, instagram hot takes and so on, rethinking many of our initial thoughts. Though Barbie remained very much a fun film, one that should certainly be watched in the cinema, there was a sense that this film was just fun.

A great bit of superficial fun, that did not try to gesture at deeper meanings, nor truly try to break gender binaries (because how could Barbies???? even as there is one radical moment where Barbie and Ken, in the real world, tell construction workers, that neither has genitals, a radicality immediately defeated by how binarised the worlds remain and perhaps the fact that Barbie goes to the gynaecologist, confirming the bio essentialist reality of her as a 'woman' idk). Even the Weird Barbie wasn't weird enough for me - wasn't unsettling enough, wasn't subversive enough, didn't possess any qualities that might offset the 'sweet' 'funness' of the Barbie universe. No character beyond Barbie or Ken were developed, especially the real world mother-daughter pair upon whom much action hinges, but who remain empty vessels, unrealized people with no interior lives or histories, nothing. That one monlogue that has garnered significant praise across the Barbie discourse was quite average, in my opinion - it did not force me to think deeper or did it connect with me very emotionally. In a landscape where we've broken gender right open and are actively trying to collapse boundaries, this film did little in that direction, but enforced these dualities instead. I don't think it even properly examined how patriarchy reduces men and harms them deeply too.

I came across a recent review that seemed to be arguing that Ken should have his own movie - because this movie is called 'Barbie' and it should be only about her!!! and I found this to be quite a reductive approach because if you're trying to examine patriarchy and gender roles (forget race or ethnicity guys, that's pushing it right now) - then we need as many narratives as possible in there, and it was very interesting to see a 'Ken'. I did not feel that he 'took over' filmic space meant for 'Barbie', or that his presence or storyline detracted from the larger narrative - in fact, often, he was the most entertaining, compelling aspect of the film. I love Margot Robbie and she's done an excellent job, but I think the film overpromises - as does much of the discourse/reviewing around it. It's a fun watch, surely and you'll be singing along and you'll love the visuals - kinda made me think of Katy Perry's California Gurls a bit (I could think of other references too but eh?) - but it's a surface level film. You kinda get what you see, and not much else. And that's alright, perhaps, because it is a film by a company that essentially makes these dolls that many of us spent our lives idealizing (and yes, breaking etc etc). So yeah, thanks Greta Gerwig but you did a lot better with your earlier films. Feminism doesn't really need Barbie at the moment, I think.

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I'm all done here, in a bit of a rushed manner. I also semi-watched this film Unpregnant on the plane but I don't really have much to say except I'm glad I didn't finish because it didn't make me feel anything at all, really. Average, average, below average?

As for this coming month, let's see where the watching and viewing takes me. You know, we're currently watching Good Omens together. Made in Heaven just came out. I also finished Wellmania. Perhaps time for another post, in a little bit. I hope these anecdotes get a little more interesting as we go, and perhaps more critical/well informed.

~ U

We're not 100 years old. I'm right here. And you're right there looking so beautiful.

Druk (2020), written by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm

Oppenheimer: The Horror, The Horror

Film Inquiry, July 2023

“he wasn’t like the others

he was an artist, he was kind

he was, delicate”

~Jennifer remembering her son~

Feature Film Script: Ms Harrison

Hey my name is Luci and this is my first day on Tumblr I am a aspiring actress playwriter bookwriter and filmwriter and I'm just looking for a couple of communities to join and learn from.