Neptune by Foals from the album Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part II - Director: David East

KATHY BATES as Annie Wilkes & JAMES CAAN as Paul Sheldon in Misery (1990) (dir. Rob Reiner)

Misery (1990)

one of my favourites!

*extreme rob reiner’s mom in the diner scene of when harry met sally voice* I’LL have what SHE’S having 😍

Misery (1990) Annie Wilkes' memory lane

Misery (1990) // Dir. Rob Reiner

Misery (1990, Rob Reiner)

20/04/2024

tsurumi is a master male manipulator who puts on erratic behavior for show and has each blink under calculated control but then he sees asirpa once and absolutely loses it... that child is really god's strongest soldier. stan attractor where the stans are grown men with weird psychological problems

On December 31, 1990, Misery debuted in Poland.

Discussion time with Johnny

i was watching  Love After Lockup at my moms house.

KATHY BATES as ANNIE WILKES in Misery (1990) dir. Rob Reiner

One of my favorite negative reviews

I can’t find a full text of it online, so I’m going to copy out some big chunks of Stephen Hunter’s retrospective on Gone with the Wind, which apparently resulted in lots of angry letters to the editor.

Long, stupid, ugly and, alas, back for the sixth time (in theaters, innumerable television showings have preceded this rerelease), it is probably the most beloved bad movie of all time, as its adjusted box office gross of $5 billion makes clear. If you love it, that is fine; but don’t confuse its gooeyness, its spiritual ugliness, its solemn self-importance, with either art or craft, for it boasts none of the former and only a bit of the latter. It is one of the least remarkable films of that most remarkable of American movie years, 1939. In fact, far from being one of the greatest American films ever made, I make it merely the twenty-eighth best film of 1939! It may not even have been the best movie that opened on December 15, 1939! It is overrated, overlong, and overdue for oblivion.

Of the various characters and actors:

It’s profoundly misogynistic...the secret pleasure of the film is watching Scarlett O’Hara being punished for the sin of selfhood. The movie delights in her crucifixion, even to the point of conjuring the death of a child as apt punishment for her ambitions. Her sin, really, is the male sin: the pride which goeth before the fall...

Leslie Howard was a great actor and a brave man, who raced home to join his unit when World War II broke out, thereby missing the famous December Atlanta premiere. He was killed in 1943 when the Nazis shot down a plane he was in. Let us lament him as we lament all the men who gave their lives to stop that evil. That said, the truth remains that on screen, he was a feathery creature, best cast as the foil to Bogart’s brutish Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, where his cathedral-abutment cheekbones gave him the look of an alabaster saint in the wall of an Italian church. But he was about as believable as a sexual object as he would have been as Duke Mantee...

The wondrous Olivia de Havilland was an actress of spunk and pizazz, and she gave as good as she got, even across from such hammy scene stealers as her longtime costar Flynn. But she, too, is trashed by Gone with the Wind as sugary Melanie Wilkes, a character of such selfless sweetness she could give Santa Claus a toothache.

Of the film as art:

Too much spectacle, not enough action. David O. Selznick, who produced the film and rode it to immortality, didn’t understand the difference between the two. Thus the film has a fabulous but inert look to it; the story is rarely expressed in action but only in diorama-like scenes. It is curiously flat and unexciting. Even the burning of Atlanta lacks dynamism and danger; it’s just a dapple of flickering orange filling the screen without the power and hunger of a real fire. And the movie’s most famous shot- the camera pulling back to reveal Scarlett in a rail yard of thousands of bleeding, tattered Confederate soldiers- makes exactly the wrong point. It seems to be suggesting that Scarlett has begun to understand that the war is much bigger than she is. And yet she never changes. The shot means nothing in terms of character; it’s an editorial aside that really misleads us.

Of the film’s message:

From its opening credits, which characterize the South as a lost land of lords and ladies, to its final images of Tara nestling among the Georgia dogwood, the movie buys into a myth that completely robs the region of its truth. Love it or hate it, it’s a land (as Faulkner knew) in which the nobility of its heroism lived side by side with the ugliness of its Original Sin: slavery. I’m not attacking the South here, just Margaret Michell and Selznick’s version of it. Other movies or 1939 were beginning to find the courage to express some subtle ideas. One of them was John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.

Of its comparison to other 1939 movies:

I found 797 titles from the year 1939, had seen fewer than a tenth of them, and even on that small list there were 27 that struck me as fundamentally better than Gone with the Wind, movies that I would watch again with utter delight. They are: Allegheny Uprising, Another Thin Man, Babes in Arms, Beau Geste, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Dark Victory, Dodge City, Drums Along the Mohawk, Golden Boy, Gunga Din, Juarez, The Light that Failed, Made for Each Other, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Real Glory, The Roaring Twenties, Stagecoach, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, The Three Musketeers, Union Pacific, The Wizard of Oz, The Women, Wuthering Heights, and Young Mr. Lincoln.

Dammit, my dear, I’m just being frank.

There was nothing overtly biased about the way the Wilkes-Barre Township Police Department described a mugging on its Facebook page in February 2019. The first post simply described a Black suspect who was alleged to have threatened a victim with a gun and demanded cash in this small community in northeastern Pennsylvania. Two later Facebook posts about the case congratulated the police on catching the suspect. 

But two years before, when a white man had robbed a gas station at gunpoint and fled the scene, the police department’s social media response was completely different. There was no mention of the case on social media at all, according to John Rappaport, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who is part of a team studying racial bias in law enforcement social media accounts. Not before the suspect was arrested, to warn the public and seek their help in an arrest. And not after, to reassure the community that the suspect had been caught. “The crimes are quite similar,” Rappaport said. “[It undermines] any notion that crime severity is straightforwardly driving the department’s posting decisions.”

This is just one example of a larger pattern of bias that Rappaport’s team found when they analyzed nearly 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by law enforcement agencies across the United States. They found that police Facebook pages consistently overreport crimes by Black suspects relative to local arrests rates: Between 2010 and 2019, Black suspects were described in 32 percent of posts but represented just 20 percent of arrestees. It mirrors statistics that show white Americans overestimate the percentage of crimes committed by Black Americans by as much 20 to 30 percent compared to the actual figures (numbers that, themselves, already reflect a bias in who gets arrested versus who actually commits crimes). 

And scientists say it’s reasonable to suspect those two sets of statistics are connected to one another. “We really framed the paper as being less about ‘are police departments behaving well or badly,’ and more about the perspective of the reader,” Rappaport said. That’s because these biased accounts are likely part of feedback loops, reflecting bigger issues in society as police both respond to — and perpetuate — the myths white Americans already believe.

Happy STS!

Tell me more about this Wild West AU idea. I’ve heard you mention it a few times but now that I’m actively reading AASOAF I want the details 👀

~ @tabswrites

TESS PLEASE

This idea has me in such a choke hold IM TELLING YOU. Not just because I want to write a Western but because I want Axtapor to be a cowboy so bad. I've mentioned it in this ask here and in the tags on this one here, and then I think there was another post but now I can't find it :(

Basically there is no plot in this AU LOL i just really love the idea of putting the cast in typically spaghetti western scenarios and imagining how they would play out in my head. Putting this below a cut bc it got longer than I thought it would.

Axtapor would be your train-robbing gunslinger. He rolls into town and is like "Gotta stay low 'round these parts. Ran me outta town last I was 'ere for tanglin' with the wrong sort of man." You know just this type who thinks he's waaaayyyy cooler and more mysterious than he actually is lol. I imagine his trusty steed has the attitude of Roach from the Witcher or Pegasus from Hercules and that he holds conversations ad nauseam with it.

Mariel is a little bo peep type who only visits town with her parents to sell their sheep's wool and other goods from their farm several miles out of town. I imagine that she's the type that falls for Axtapor's man-of-mystery act and secretly looks for him whenever they go into town but never does more than watch him from afar. In my mind she says "Heavens!" a lot lol. And maybe one time her parents catch her staring at Axtapor and warn her "That boy ain't any good. Stay away from 'im, ya 'ear?"

Fay is the local saloon owner that wears those giant feathers on her head and something lowcut so the bar patrons buy more booze. She is the head of a brothel in this AU and operates a spy network with the help of her girls. She's the one who pulls the fat shotgun from under the bar and goes "Y'all best be goin' now." She owns two big, grey dogs that sleep at her feet and follow her around wherever she goes. Their names are Right and Left.

And finally Wilkes, the actual man-of-mystery. He's the one who rolls into town and the shutters and doors all close as he passes. Men and women faint at the sight of him either because he's broken their heart once before or he beat the shit out of them. He comes riding in on this giant white horse called Moon who looks as serious as he does. Fay is the only one in town who's not afraid of him, definitely calls him "Big Boy" and he blushes a little about it every time. Oh and when he shows up the locals go "Careful now, the Moon is fallin'."

Round one Poll Seven: Annie Wilkes (Misery) VS Baby Firefly (Rob Zombie’s Firefly trilogy)