Interview Breaks Bad??

So, I watched the trailer for the AMC series of Interview with the Vampire, and... I have words. Lots of words. All of them... varied.

Where I thought maybe Christopher, Anne's son, was responsible for raising the homosexual subtext to the level of actual text, I don't think he's included in this at all. The numerous rights wars and bidding skirmishes put it in the hands of AMC with Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul alum behind the entire production. Which is cool and all, as it's a totally different tone than these shows, but they've decided to do away with the negative aspects of the plantation period to slightly modernise it into the earlier 1900s. Which means: Louis is now a black man looking for some status and wealth, Lestat's very much his seducer and the one with all the money (and still white AF and very lionesque, perhaps even angelic), and Claudia's also black, however I don't know what her status is, I don't think she's entirely impoverished either. The three of them seem to be a pack of hunters rather than a strange (and ironically progressive) same-sex parent family.


Oh, and Daniel (the Interviewer) is now an older journalist familiar of Louis's who seems to be treating the interview with more incredulity and an air of interrogation rather than naive wonderment. Okay. Sure. He's still Daniel Molloy however, and has a younger version of himself.


I'm not detracting from Louis and Lestat's unique intimacy, and the romantic affection showed by all the vampires in the series. Marius and Armand were probably more graphically sexual, Louis and Armand had a certain attraction that was intimate and intellectual. Lestat and Gabrielle, his mother, have their own interactions that hint at a vague incestuousness marred by Gabrielle's want to explore the world alone.
But Louis and Lestat were complicated as fuck. And the thing is, vampires are basically impotent because Enkil is canonically without a dick, which renders his ancestors of sorts incapable. The sumptuousness of their relationship is really something to examine outside the penile-centric nature of sex. Absolutely, by all means have them make out and Eiffel Tower some women. Make them true companions in every sense of the word. They toned it down in the early 90s and yeah, that's absolutely annoying I get that, but they weren't completely shying away from the homoeroticism either. In a pre-Brokeback world, it was still there on screen, it was still capable of affecting audiences. I dug it. You can't accuse them of not giving us anything.

What this show does though, is effectively make this a kind of fan fiction the fans really wanted. You couldn't get Tom Cruise to make out with Brad Pitt, let's just make Jacob Anderson make out with Sam Reid, who does suit the appearance more of what we expect of Lestat. If it satiates that itch for the fans, go for it. I'm just not that interested in this story and I don't want the annoyance of nitpicking aspects because I'm a purist. All the remakes of my favourite books aren't good, while Rings of Power and the Whatever Dragon Show are satisfying the fans, that's fine, I'm not interested any more than I expect them to care about this. The Vampire Chronicles also has a rabid fanbase who deserve better. They understand that people won't sympathise with a white slave owner, even if Louis was benevolent, he was a slave owner. It explains his innumerable wealth that the somewhat broke Lestat is after, however it's not really part of Louis's character, either, it's a burden to him. I'll accept removing it invites a wider audience, though. Whether or not he needs to be white now, that's one thing, but he won't technically be Louis either, he seems less dour for one. The cast list has a brother and a sister and a mother, which is correct, they've not gone with the throwaway wife and child in the movie. From this, it seems more like he's bored with his life and drawn to the allure of wealth and sexuality he can't explore with anyone else. Lestat still seems like Lestat, only less overtly abusive and more cunning and manipulative. And even that isn't subtext, it's in the dialogue Louis was in an abusive entanglement with his maker and lover. What this appears to be is a more mutual arrangement where Louis is allowed to explore his forbidden wants and Lestat gains a companion for protection through the centuries. Plus the question of the elusive vampire population is still raised, and so likely to be Louis's quest in later episodes. There's a bunch of characters that are completely new, which seems so odd considering the Chronicles were being sold with a huge variety of characters AMC seem to not give a flying fuck about but hadn't been given proper, or any, onscreen interpretations. (Bert Newton's son as a pretty blonde Armand is no compensation for the blatant miscasting of Antonio Banderas in the 1994 adaptation).


Claudia still seems like hell in a pair of satin slippers, which is fine, however I highly doubt Louis relationship with her will be peppered with pedophilic undertones. That's another "woman's brain in a girl's body so it's all okay" scenario the internet has deemed morally reprehensible, so yeah, she'll be a bone of contention for other reasons. She was very much pulled between Lestat and Louis, I think it would be more interesting for her to maybe play them against each other more rather than become overtly violent and acting betrayed. She claws for her own agency but still needs a protector, so is Lestat bringing her into the fold to keep Louis from leaving, or is it another reason she's there? Her antics are what drive Louis and Lestat to endless arguments on how to raise her as a child vampire.

And now Anne's gone, I have no idea if she'd have approved. I thought she was working with Christopher and this was his brain child but I was completely wrong. Now it seems like an almost pointless adaptation, even if it's been critically accepted and praised. Shakespeare's been reimagined in multiple contexts and periods, so you can apply the same logic to Interview, with the author no longer metaphysically dead and now actually deceased, neither she or her estate can do anything. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, (which is gatekeeping their actual reviews), is lower but not significantly bad. But I don't see why you couldn't keep the same story and change Louis profession while still bringing it into a more enlightened age. I can't get away with complaining about that without sounding racist, I can accept a new version of Louis but what was entirely wrong with the original? Does this mean Lestat can't bemoan Louis's interminable whining through the centuries? The fact it got old made Lestat the hero of the Chronicles, I totally admit if we'd have had nothing but Louis for books on end, yes, it would've gotten fucking old. But it's not like he's the absolute worst either. I said I wouldn't mind a remake of the movie, this isn't what I had in mind.

There's absolutely no reason to completely change the Mayfair Witches because we haven't had any adaptations of that, and that's a lot to get through, The Witching Hour is an slog as it's a history lesson on the family. Their ties to the Vampire Chronicles was interesting except for the fact Rowan Mayfair seemed to be completely erased from the newer books. I wasn't even entirely happy with that being the conclusion of both series. I liked they were linked by the Talamasca without there being heavy overlap, and Mona Mayfair's kind of irritating so it sucks she gets to be a vampire. Lestat imposing on the family through an entirely new Mayfair descendant seems a tad ridiculous too, but it was a clear killing of two birds with one stone in Blood Canticle. All authors are allowed to say they're done with a series and return to it ten years later, it happens. It doesn't mean what we get is good, though.

I want to see a Mayfair Witch series and I like we haven't got anything to compare it to now. The incest is probably the one thing making it too difficult to adapt acceptably, even though people eat up adaptations of British royal family stories that were full of that nonsense in real life. Oh, and Game of Thrones made it "fine", right. It'll be like that.


So, the Mayfair Witches trailer dropped and it looks... fine. Trailer was cool, but using a cool song I like doesn't help as it amps me up for something that still might be crap. It looks kind of watered down but there are interesting aspects. Again I assumed a regular character was cast as a black guy but there's no indication it's actually Aaron Lightener just because they bring up the Talamasca, I'm okay with that but yeah Aaron's another old white dude. Whether they'll link this up with the Interview series at some point down the road, that I have to pay for access to AMC via Amazon I'll probably wind up giving Interview a try anyway. Of course the dance mom from Donnie Darko Beth Grant's playing a religious fanatic like she did in the Mist, she's Carlotta, obviously. It's all by the Breaking Bad peeps too. I don't know how their style will translate in this case.

What pissed me off is Witching Hour isn't available on Kindle and I really wanted to start re-reading it as I'm kinda bored with Firestarter. My copy is missing the cover and finding another copy is difficult, so unless the series generates enough interest in the book and they decide to actually release it is another matter. It would seem pretty stupid not to. It's fucking ridiculous the terrible porn she wrote got released and this and Lestat didn't. Supposedly she distanced herself from the vampire stuff but that obviously didn't last forever whether she left the church or felt compelled to bring Lestat back with a bunch of nonsense, it doesn't make sense to have two random books from the two biggest series completely unavailable on Kindle. Fuck, I'll take a bad optical scan like I did with Imagica over having nothing at all. I get I own this shit but I don't want to lug the book around and I like having stuff on my kindle, so my plan to read the Vampire Chronicles was shot to pieces when Lestat wasn't available. I don't know whether it's a rights issue I thought it all went back to the estate. The nutso thing is Lestat's an audiobook and not a Kindle. I'm sorry, I don't like audiobooks, I know people love them because reading sucks but I actually get horribly bored listening to them, particularly if the character voices the reader uses don't really fit my idea of what the character would sound like. And they're fucking expensive, and I don't want an audible subscription. It's where I delineate from everyone who just wants audiobooks thinking they're the easiest thing in the world to produce and sell and since it means they can feel less shitty about not having the patience to read. Isn't that kind of childish though? Wanting another adult to read you a bedtime story? Do you want them reading you my shit? No fucking thanks. It's the other reason I keep it a secret more from everyone, I honestly don't want these people associating me with this shit, I wish I'd been a ghost writer with a full NDA preventing me from even admitting it was me. It's the perfect crime. To me, I get something out into the world that isn't a total hot mess to look at, I don't have to commit to promotion or major editing and nobody has to know and bug me about reading it. The collaboration process might be annoying but honestly I'd just try to meet their expectations regardless. It'd be fitting everything around a deadline that would prove trickier.

Oh, fuck you Amazon you release Spanish versions of all the Chronicles but you can't fucking release an English version.

Update: I managed to see a reaction video of the second episode of Interview and there was a lot of muttering, muted and violent gesticulating and clapbacks involved from my end. Rather than have Louis persistently wrestle with losing his humanity, he picks and chooses when to be a monster and criticises Lestat for being messy and inhumane about killing, not for killing as a deed. Random tit shots. Malloy is a journalist, the acting from him is wooden and stoic, it's over dinner in a pretentiously designed room, (I'm assuming each episode is a night in this room). Louis openly drinks blood from a human in front of Daniel and lets the human walk off and collapse in the hallway like it's the funniest thing ever. Daniel acts like this is nothing, so there's no childlike wonderment. Despite them saying it's meant to avoid racist overtones, Louis calls Lestat out for inferring he's a slave. Apparently there's social commentary on priests being kiddy fiddlers and perfectly decent fodder for vampires, I won't deny people knew this about priests but I doubt they spoke of it openly, it would've been more taboo to mention it than to do the act itself What, is Lestat now going to take in abused orphans from a church? The dialogue is awful and isn't used appropriately. The acting is dreadful. Louis douses himself in milk from being caught in the sun after he's specifically told by Lestat not to run home. Instead of Louis's quiet astonishment from seeing through vampire eyes, there's a goofy scene where Louis's just tripping balls. Lestat just goes from deadpan to angry, he has no real charisma from what I could see, then he just makes gay comments. The subtext and text are there at the same time. I don't think the actual fans are happy with this overall. It looks frustratingly dreadful and silly, people are already comparing it to fan fiction and spoof movies. I won't touch it. But this doesn't bode well for the Mayfair Witch series in terms of acting at least. This is so bad.

Girls on film... Why I can't even with Lena Dunham

I had a copy of the pilot of Girls I got for free with another DVD set (I think it was whatever HBO show I bought at the time, I can't even remember). I had it on good authority it was great and worth the bother, and this was before streaming really took off so I could use the promo disc as it was intended. Maybe twenty minutes in, I gave up.

Opening on a scene where a white girl who's taken her parents' generosity for granted finds out they're cutting her off made me too uncomfortable and probably tapped into my own sense of teenage narcissism that spilled over into my early 20s. I don't really like cringe black comedy, it's why I don't think I could sit through Nathan for You or a lot of Curb. Reading over the pilot episode, I can kinda see how you're supposed to sympathise with Dunham's Hanna, things are shitty for her, but at that age, I couldn't even get an unpaid internship my parents thought would turn into a real job. I was happy to have the government give me money so I could feign financial independence from my parents (they still covered my insurance even after I had my own policy and a wage, I only removed their details when I worked for the actual company to get my now removed subsidy. Sadly, they didn't realise they'd under-insured me when I finally had another breakdown at 28 and I had to explain why when I was well again). 

 But my point is, even when I was down to my last 80c which covered the train ride into town to hand in my Centrelink form and get paid, I didn't call my parents for more money. I might've asked for more if I was desperate in uni but I kept it to a minimum, and usually felt bad if I spent it on anything other than rent, food or bills. During my first episode, I spent money on a dress and I remember my mother making a comment about it being "my money" in that way you know they really disapprove. I don't think she did like how I spent my money back then, but she wouldn't say, and I know she wasn't thrilled with covering my rent when I wanted to move out permanently and live in the city. Up until then, I came home from uni every year so I wasn't staying in residence over the summer, and we usually had to reapply, out of towners getting priority, so it meant I was approved for each year I attended. I have no idea what I'd have done had I not, I know my parents really wanted me to move back after my first hospitalisation and I'm sure they were looking into me finishing my studies at the sister campus in town, where my mother actually worked. I know she pulled strings to get me through my first year, I doubt they'd have let me take my exams down there had I asked myself. I know she really came through, however I also couldn't drop out at that point and take a year off despite desperately wanting to (looking back, this was my first instance of absolute burnout and not realising this made it harder to get over and avoid repeating). I appreciated she later said she didn't know how I got through it despite everything. I had to. I had a choice to really screw up and I chose to keep going instead, whether I hated it or not.

So, I don't really see how I'm supposed to find Hanna's character endearing, when the pilot ends with her, in a haze from opium tea, demanding her parents pay her 1100 a month and that they read her memoir she'll never publish. I know this was based on her personal experiences and you're meant to cringe with her but, no thanks. I understand there was supposed to be self-deprecation in this character portrayal but to me Dunham wasn't selling it in real life. She was becoming an industry darling who later had to apologise for assuming she knew what a black man was thinking. (Her getting together with Amy Schummer really became a bad marriage of egos at that point, and both of them were being exposed for their abundant flaws despite their previous popularity). 

I don't hold up these projects when they're female-centric as they tend to get bogged down in their own need for validation from critics as being important feminist pieces that seem to suggest they're exempt from objective criticism. I hated Wonder Woman and the 2016 Ghostbusters were just overshadowed by this so when it came time to really give opinions on the films themselves, any negative critique was labelled sexist. Brie Larson failed to be another champion for the cause when she said something valid in a very invalidating way, I heard a lot of condescension where others didn't. Sorry, honey, but you do sound like you hate white dudes. You sound passive aggressive and silly, that's what people were mad at. Somehow, you made Disney money off the back of "charity" so underprivileged girls could watch your movie. (I know it wasn't her but it was terrible when you really thought about what it meant in terms of valid "charity"). There's a myriad of better ways you can say we need more women reviewing movies. Most of the white dudes I watch on YouTube have actual time for female reviewers. They've been very respectful of them. If you want to say Red Letter Media are right wing commenters, you're a fucking idiot. Whether they were working with women previously or not, they're not the most problematic white guys online. I'm pretty confident I know which white dudes to throw under the bus by now, and it's not Rich Evans.

I veered off topic, my point was I didn't have a lot of time for watching Dunham beat herself up in the way I've consciously been doing my whole life. I've absolutely taken sole responsibility of dishing out any damage anyone had primed for me. If people did miss the point of Girls, maybe it wasn't as obvious, I don't know. Like I said, Dunham making herself so thoroughly unlikable, even to this very day where she's tweeting egotistical "LGBT ally saviour complex" nonsense for attention, how am I supposed to believe she's still not stuck in a sense of narcissism, as if she's  being sarcastic, I'm not seeing it, and I'm not that bad at reading sarcasm for someone who may or may not be on the spectrum. 

I'm going over a video essay that's from one of those verified content farms like WatchMojo that are usually a little too fair to certain shows. I also came across Dunham's article on Marilyn Monroe suggesting she's not unlike her, her mention of "childless" women annoying coming from a supposed feminist given women who have chosen not to have kids, like me, are childfree, childless denoting you're somehow a failure for failing to procreate. I understand she's gone through a lot of shit and tragedy but I can't see why she needs to keep popping up online saying contentious shit all the time. I also saw she was looking to make a Girls movie by 40, as of 2015, and she's now 37, so I'm questioning what interest there would be in a Girls movie, coming from someone who didn't think we'd ever be a Community movie, the fans wanted that and got it. Are there fans of Girls who want a movie? Well, the lack of a hashtag campaign would suggest otherwise. Rabid fanbases make shit happen, for good or bad. I haven't seen a groundswell for other movie adaptations of cult millennial shows.

I will admit my aversion to Girls was Dunham holding up a mirror to my own self-loathing, mid-twenties self. I still carry a lot of regret for how self-indulgent my episodes feel in retrospect, which is why I've distanced myself from involving people in this. I hate people in her age bracket are suffering from economic problems they didn't themselves create, what distances Dunham from that is her personal privilege and connections that gave her an in-road others perhaps didn't have. And her relative success now removes her from that economic burden. Which is fine, she's worked hard enough, I won't refute that, it's only made her less relatable. Maybe the idea of her having a memoir she felt worthy of publication rubs me up the wrong way when I didn't see myself as a self-indulgent writer, just an ignored one. Having said that, what she did publish in real life received a lot of backlash that wasn't worth the PR acrobatics she had to do back then to apologise. But yeah, joking you were a sexual predator towards a sibling would be considered triggering to anyone who did suffer sibling sexual abuse, whether your experience wasn't viewed the same way. (How many times do you want to apologise for what you've said in one lifetime? How are you not constantly exhausted and embarrassed?). I don't see why she continues to say what she says despite her success, unless it's a form of compulsive self-sabotage she hasn't addressed through therapy. I do know it is a nightmare navigating your 20s and 30s with a diagnosis nobody can agree on while being given far too much medication to cope with said illness when you're inside a medical model that dehumanises women for having mental illnesses in the first place. I wouldn't take that away from her.

Maybe it's because I didn't treat my 40s as being a terrifying phase and have been so desperate to get out of my 20s and 30s with the erroneous notion people would take me seriously by now. They don't. But I didn't have drug and alcohol addiction, endometriosis and the weight of expectation from the industry to be something I'm not. I sympathise with all that until Dunham reminds me she's sometimes incapable of checking herself before wrecking herself. Dreading your 40s seems to be the millennial curse left over from Gen X/Y fearing their 30s, where you're called a boomer at age 45 until someone reminds you how old the oldest millennials are now. I just fail at relating to them by simply being stuck between Gen X/Y and millennials and I was always writing to get away from myself and my surroundings. I wasn't bold enough for her honesty, which is admirable when it's not being completely and pointlessly offensive and glib.

As an addendum, she landed in similar BS as Ellen did over a shelter dog, and outed her sibling who's trans. It's still up for debate if the molestation allegations were true since she was protected by a society that probably comes to the defense of the wrong people, and the sibling didn't press charges. I don't know if I'd have been that forthcoming about any of it in the first place. Again, how much reward should one person get for being that blatantly and brutally honest? I'm waiting for her to say she's on the spectrum as that's a big known trait, saying things you find benign and it being taken as absolutely offensive. (Yes, when you're learning about a thing the thing paints your judgement of other things. I'm sorry).

Amazon has its own low bar for movies

If you've heard recently Amazon's become a viable distributor of bad independently made films, it's basically true. Having seen people react to some of these films, it's been killing me they've lowered the bar much like they did for books so they could flood Amazon Prime with absolutely shit content. Granted, Contrapoints failed to get her YouTube series approved, which is professionally made but sadly too full of gay content, it still suggests there is some gatekeeping. But if you have a shitty movie with mild Christian undertones, you may be in luck with Amazon. Provided you've uploaded a movie of reasonable quality in terms of visual/audio presentation, even if it has a terrible plot and appalling acting, it'll likely be approved for distribution. Sure, Amazon withholds the right to remove this (I'd say from poor views but it could be anything) at their discretion, but you can put your godawful God movie on there. Amazon's willingness to make money with publishing anyway possible couldn't stop at books. The only major difference is, most people's shitty books are never taken down unless there's a valid copyright strike, and given I barely had to prove my retention of rights, I'd say most of remained.

On top of that, I've been watching a show they salvaged from good old SyFy called The Magicians. It's been a pretty good show but they actually "stole" some of my ideas.

1. Girl throws positive pregnancy test in a rage over discovering unwanted child who will be destined to fulfill some prophecy.
2. Race of not so nice elementals (theirs were evil fairies and mine were indifferent sylphs but their demeanor was similar) conspire to take first born of human couple for own purposes without regard to human couple/child
3. Malevolent dryad character spurned by humans retaliates and laments being abused.
   

It's always bizarre to see someone else give a visual representation of an idea you wrote independent of the show. I don't plan on publishing the above, but it's always in my head if I did, I'd be the one accused of thievery. If I were more open, I'd say I'd written these and comment on the strange coincidence, all the while reminded of the collective unconsciousness of humanity and the fact there are no new idea.