Pretty? Woman?

I don't hate this movie for a 90s romcom, it's suitable. It has a bit more substance to it, I guess. I don't know My Fair Lady outside of a couple of songs. I don't know Pygmalion at all, just the premise. I don't hate Julia Roberts but I don't know about the idea of her being "pretty". She had a certain look about her that made her unique, I think she and Sarah Jessica Parker got some unfair flack for not being conventionally beautiful, they have teeth and mouths other women get shit for not fixing. Roberts was supposed to be Corey in Say Anything... she didn't fit the bill, she looks too mature, I think she's supposed to be pretty young in this movie. I kinda joked it should be "Moderately Attractive Lady", I think that was a Harmontown joke. She's more or less infantalised by the two men who are supporting her. Jason Alexander is actually really great in this even if he gets hella rapey later, he has to work as a bone of contention between the lovers and he knew better than to lean on what he was well known for. And Julia Roberts has wrinkly as fuck toes when they're in the bath, by the way. Not up to Tarantino Toe Standards. I also had a massive issue with "80s Brow" when I was a kid because I hated my thicker brows, I still do, but I think this was more a darker brow issue with the pencil and I don't own a pencil knowing people want to give me actual brows.

I didn't see this as a kid, it was another of those "adult" movies that were out and I was a kid, it was one of those movies where the soundtrack songs were charting when I was little so again it had music on those cheap-ass compilation tapes. I liked the song from Working Girl, I don't know the movie that well. I don't even know why I'm making this post, I noticed it looked like it relies heavily on ADR. It's not a shitty movie, I think it has a decent amount of drama, Richard Gere's character has some substance to him, he's not just the romantic lead, they play off one another well, there's sufficient chemistry. I like he doesn't try to hide Vivian's purpose, it's not up for debate, but she's rightfully shitty he lets it slip. He doesn't do a heck of a lot "grooming" her and giving her deportment lessons, or elocution lessons for that matter, she can get away with her melange of a lower-class accent. I think they thought there was being a respectful depiction being made of hookers but it's clearly not when she has to admit it's not really for her, she's still actively shamed about her profession, which wouldn't work. Having seen the last Magic Mike movie, which was a Pretty Woman rip off, and a hilarious one at that, I was still confused about Mike being an actual sex worker and not just a dancer. And that didn't exactly paint sex workers in a positive light either, which is absolutely shitty. Sex work in the 90s was obviously further demonised off the back of the AIDS epidemic, hooker with a heart of gold is a trope that doesn't work now, you can't get away with it but god forbid they tried to remake it with Vivian telling him to get bent and staying on Only Fans instead. She'll do better there, anyway.

Watching Fight Club in the early 2000s was the worst and best time...

Our home computer had a trailer my brother downloaded for Fight Club, he was aware of this before the general public got a hold of it. I think I saw it on VHS first, then for class I had to watch it at a local independent theatre. And while we had an operational IMAX theatre, I got to see it there too. I had the soundtrack, I knew most of Tyler's lines. I wrote about it in an essay after only seeing it once, I think, so my ability to retain a lot of detail about a film after one viewing is pretty impressive. (And yeah, bitch who told me to write 3000 words on three forms of orchestral music, I can write that much on fucking Fight Club, American Beauty and the depiction of men in media. I am capable of saying A LOT if I CARE about it).

I hung out with guys who threw shit off a tower in an act of defiance. I spent the night with a guy (nothing actually happened) and we watched it, and I knew it pretty well, so he thought I'd seen it a lot more than I had. But they also weren't complete incels (maybe they were I didn't see it) and I was still trying to be "that girl", the "one of the guys" girls, and I was hanging out with more guys than girls if I did hang with anyone. It was important (it still is) for me not to be the Yoko, or the Marla, so to speak. 

But Marla was cool, you're supposed to side with her, she's not the bad guy. If you see Tyler as the good guy, you've missed the point. And I kinda did, I kinda idolised the swagger and anti-capitalistic rhetoric, but then you grow up and find out Brad Pitt is a piece of shit human being with anger issues. He's never been "cool". (I'm also old enough to understand the concept of cigarette burns on a film and remember seeing them). I kinda drank the Kool-Aid but I'm not a fan of actual destruction as a form of protest. I'm okay with kids interrupting a pointless dinner or performance in protest of whatever economical/ecological disaster the rich are perpetuating that week, I wouldn't be that annoyed if they did it to me. I only don't agree with wanton destruction or getting in the way of your own people trying to get on with their lives. So I don't "believe" in Project Mayhem any more than I could believe in the tenets of Fight Club. (I can't recite the rules, by the way). And I'm pretty sure a chunk of the film's audience never bothered reading the book, which ends differently. China's not allowed to see the actual ending, by the way, it's been edited with a written epilogue. Which intimates that Tyler is either real or Edward Norton's character is the one sent to an asylum, he's not even "killed" by Norton's character. So that would suggest you're still supposed to think Tyler is real. That's bad, China. I want to know if the kiss is in that version too, since its subtext is homoerotic, and you're not supposed to have gay stuff in movies in China, so did they "fix" that too? The bass drop after the kiss even has a sexy feel to it, before it gets graphic. (This fake ending is kind of in line with the book's ending too, which makes it funnier and subversive if you think about the narrator leaving the hospital in 2012, when Project Mayhem's already taken over the world).

When Tyler's questioning the "point" of women, you're not supposed to take the red pill, boys. Or the black one. Nobody's asking you to take the blue one, either, btw. Maybe don't take any fucking pill and think for yourself (be a Sigma, man). Discern facts from fiction. None of the men in Fight Club are actively attacking women until Marla's an issue, and they're not entirely comfortable with it, really. They're trying to pick fights with a male stranger, they're not being told to go out and pick up women. They're recruiting men. They're supposed to lose. Acting like Tyler won't get you pussy. You're not supposed to like Marla so why would you agree with her sexual appetites? Wouldn't a woman saying she wants to have your abortion freak you out, anyway? That's an alternate cut, I know that. 

The music is amazing, it holds up even if some of the effects are outdated. It's okay for you not to subscribe to gym body worship, you can be you, that was also the point. If you have nothing to truly aspire to in terms of being a decent man, this movie isn't supposed to be your alternative. If Fight Club's the actual reason for the haircut and nice manicure, that's not cool either, bro. I want to be Marla for Halloween. You should love a girl like Marla, she's not making you clean anything in your piece of shit house, she lets you go through a box of condoms in a night and leave them in your clogged up toilet. She puts up with your shit, man. You should LOVE her. How is SHE the problem? She let you fuck her brains out ALL NIGHT. (The shot where Tyler walks in just as Marla mentions the death rattle, we saw the narrator leave at that point, so it's not a continuity error, Tyler's "there" the whole time). Tyler is effectively "hate fucking" Marla, so the narrator is participating in that without getting to enjoy it. She's also comically loud and Tyler sounds like it fucking hurts, it's quite funny. Because it's satire, dickhead. It's all satire. It's sad you couldn't enjoy this as a black comedy, really. It's sad you don't get irony the way you think you do. Find that robe Tyler wears, get it filthy and wear it unironically. Hell, Marla said you can borrow her shitty clothes. You don't get why she's singing the song from Valley of the Dolls. I have said "sticking feathers up your butt doesn't make you a chicken", that's a Tylerism I live by. You're not willing to actually live in actual filth. You actually have standards, probably higher than mine. You can live a step above sin and be closer to godliness if you just tidy up your room once in a while. And if your father failed you, what does that really tell you about God? (You know there isn't one and you can be a better man than your deadbeat dad). I wanted to lose everything at some points and to know what it was to be free. I wasn't taking that big a risk walking away from my job. Providing you a clean slate isn't society's responsibility to fulfill for you. That also doesn't mean you get to hurt society in order to get it.

You don't want Marla but you should. She's not even trying to be the mother you never had. She's willing to put up with the abuse, to an extent. You don't spend a lot of time "analysing" film either, so if you had any clue about it you wouldn't have reached the exact opposite conclusion you came to. She gives a shit if someone's burning the shit out of you. She wants to know if you care. And you do fucking care. Or else, she'd be dead, right? You can't scare her off the way Tyler thinks. She'll stand beside you as the world fucking falls down. Isn't that what you want out of anybody, not just a woman?

I went to work with a shiner and said I'd joined a club I wasn't supposed to talk about. Only one guy got it, the other one had no fucking idea what I meant.*

 

*I wound up in a social scenario where nobody believed it was an accident and everyone talked about it like it was the biggest news in the office that morning. It was bizarre and unnecessary but said a lot to how seriously people took a perceived instance of violence. It's sad I had a physical indicator that had nothing to do with my depression at the time, but my actual emotions and problems went unregistered a lot longer. Plus, people knew me to be quite meek so I had to be lying about how it happened. Which is kind of insulting to suggest I would be such a wilting flower about it. I wouldn't put up with that shit, I put up with emotional abuse since it's never registered as damaging. Me being totally fine and joking about it wasn't the best way to deal with it but people wouldn't leave me alone.

6 Year Old Me would totally love me right now

I'm healing my inner child watching the Never Ending Story with my noise cancelling headphones the government let me buy with their money. The same way I wish I could tell kid me they would one day have all the music they needed, I wish I could say, hey, one day, you'll have your own TV with streaming, and a DVD player, and whatever movies you want, and you can lie on your own couch, in your own place where nobody can stop you and you don't have to worry about your parents being annoyed with that shit since you had it on repeat. It was probably just as well we didn't own these as kids, I'd have destroyed my copy anyway. 

I'm sure Falkore probably scared kids the way G'mork is supposed to. The puppetry in this isn't bad, it's on par for the most part with Jim Henson's work, and they did the third movie. This is now I'm finding out the girl who played the Empress was in a movie recently which included the Creature Shop team, and I don't remember hearing about it, it doesn't even have an RT score, it only has two reviews so clearly nobody bothered to market it well.

Also, using headphones makes the soundtrack a lot clearer, which I also recently bought (maybe a year ago nearly) when I was horribly depressed but needed to cry a lot. I can't not get choked up at this funeral dirge level shit when you're seeing a real horse drown in a swamp and a big rock puppet man lamenting the loss of his friends and being killed by the Nothing. I mean, this is how I got in touch with questionable people on the internet who pretended to be young gay boys in love with 80s movie stars. I was finding out their names then going on forums with perverts who'd then send me material that was highly illegal. Our innocence was so easily exploitable. But kid me didn't know that either, kid me grew up without the internet, so it left me longing for all the things that soothed me because they were never readily available. If I'd been a kid in the early 2000s it would've been easier, but I'd have also missed out on what I did like. I can't see myself being nostalgic for shit that was popular after I grew up. And I think the music played too big a part in the gutkicking moments, so if I'd had the soundtracks at the very least, I might've been okay. I got by with the Labyrinth soundtrack for most of high school, but yeah, not having the videos until my late teens was kinda sad.

I also had no idea Bastian yells "Moon Child" which is supposed to be his mother's name, so I'm going to say that was her flower child name she got from some beatnick before marrying Bastian's stuffy dad who likes egg yolks in OJ. Like, what chance did Bastian have, really? Jeez. And it's not like he gets it easy in the book, so a movie that dealt with that better than the second movie did could be kinda cool. The headphones work really well you can hear the people Falkore terrorises really well. Kid me really liked this bit.

Kid me had it rougher than they should have. They honestly just wanted everything I have right now. They had to tough out a lot to get it. But they got it.

I don't like the movie, but I know it very well - Hocus Pocus

I wouldn't know Hocus Pocus as well as I do had I not crushed on the male lead since I was 12. If I'd seen it once and Leo (who was supposed to be in it) or any other guy, I'd have gone home from that sleepover and never thought of it again. It's classic Disney cringe. Thora Birch is the best part, the witches are iconic, I love they made it into modern day culture for being so camp and hilarious. It was the closest thing you could get to a female Three Stooges routine. But I can't sit through it the way I did as a kid, it's so discomforting and weird and sexually driven for a Disney movie. It wasn't intended to become a cult classic.

I also had very dark versions of this, like on VHS where some scenes were practically impossible to see unless they were in the daylight. They keep dropping trivia even now, (around Halloween, usually) and I discovered the male lead was high during some of his scenes. I saw a clip of Kathy Najimy came out in defense of Wiccans and was concerned for any negative depiction of witchcraft. And it's a horny movie as well. It does really ratchet up the innuendo, perhaps for the sake of any adults in the audience taking their under 13 kid to see it or if they watched it at home while babysitting. Addams Family (from the 90s) did a much better job with the humour, I think this is trying really hard to go with that and failing a bit. But I'm watching someone's reaction video and enjoying the way they're enjoying it and giving it shit. It's very much a movie you can lampoon for fun, it's what people love it for. But I don't love it as it wasn't a childhood favourite. I was 13 going on 14, maybe if I'd picked up the video in a store and saw who was in it I'd have freaked out back then and asked to rent it. I own a copy of Matinee more because I like it overall, and the male lead I'm referring to has a supporting role, and I don't skip scenes to get to them. But if I'd not really liked it overall, I'd have not bought it. I should rewatch Eerie Indiana, again something about trying to see this makes me feel awkward and 13 again, and that is a genuinely good show that was clever and existed in that early 90s period where the humour could be subversive and "adult" for young adults and get away with it. I don't sit down and watch Hocus Pocus for fun or Halloween or nostalgia. It is one of my cassette tape movies but it was obviously edited, I know some scenes better than others. I own it on BluRay, if I had kids in my house, I'd put it on.

The Dissertation: In the Shadow of the Night: The Gendered Subtext of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicle And Birth of the Vampire

I found a 200 page dissertation on the gendering in the Vampire Chronicles, and the contents page alone sucked me in so to speak. And it starts with a quote from the X-Files. The abstract states the books could be more conservative than liberal, which is a really interesting thesis premise, and she's only looking at the "original trilogy" (I think that's a fair way to describe them because they were closely linked by chronology, and my editions "matched" in terms of cover art).

I'll try skimming this but I wanted to say how tantilised I am by the clever chapter headings referring to song lyrics in the 90s, and makes a point that there's a distinct lack of theory about her books. I am so upset I cannot find the documentary I watched to death as a kid. Scratch that, it was called Birth of The Vampire not The Vampire's Life, which is what I remembered it as. FFUUUUUUUUCK I am so 14 right now. I loved the narrator reading from the book. The whole presentation itself is as haunting as the content. It's very much a love letter to New Orleans and superstition, I was probably more obsessed with this than the movie. I sidetracked on the dissertation. There's syncing issues with this VHS rip but I'll take it. The music is incredible, it's such a well made documentary. I learnt more of New Orleans paranormal stories, and had such a very quiet, peaceful contemplation of death. I wanted to go there more back then, I wish I had when I wanted to. It's a very sensitive portrayal of supernatural belief given they speak to people channel the dead, there's no sensationalism or mockery involved as it's depicted as a culturally significant, as any culture can be examined. I swear the TV guide said it was on TV at 2.22 pm. I have so many vivid memories of this which have made me so desperate to find it. Rice taught me more about religion than I willfully would accept at the time. There was a marrying of Catholic mysticism and the supernatural that made it kinda cool to me. This was probably slightly before I got into witchcraft. (They've cut some of the narration, which sucks). 

Back to the dissertation, I see why I had many parallels with her, our aversion to fan fiction, our frustration over being misunderstood with our content. She was unfairly reviewed, so her responses to critics were really off-kilter. She felt off-kilter after Stan died. Losing your kid wouldn't be good for your mental psyche. Stan prophetically knew Michele had cancer. I was obsessed with Christopher's account of discovering his sister's existence. I argued Claudia was Michele (or Mouse). Any of the sexual subtext between Louis and Claudia was misconstrued. If it's read through the lens of a mother/daughter relationship it has more weight to it. So it's gross people harped on Kirsten Dunst kissing Brad Pitt as a child. (Goddamn the syncing gets so much worse on this. Such a shame. I wish I'd transferred my copy at some point, this has skips of dialogue and I can't say why). I didn't know she also had to deal with the vampire culture being attributed to her and having to distance herself from the real implications of blood drinking, why her books are considered satanic when they're probably the most biblical I've read. I don't think I would've known much of any history without them.

In the documentary there's something about the orphanage she saved which I think was cut from my broadcast. I think we got maybe half of it. I'm kinda smooshing these two documents together. The dolls reminded me of my obsession with ponies. How she lived in her head from childhood.

The dissertation mentions a psychotic Brisbane woman who was a supposed lesbian vampire murderer. And someone who believed Akasha herself (the movie version which he saw 1000 times) was telling him to kill his friend. Then they mention Rice's vampires likely bred the more humanistic counterparts in stuff like True Blood and the other thing. I don't entirely think that's true.

I don't think I'm going to read over all of this, but someone suggested exploring later books is pointless as they're repetitious. Telling the same story from other angles isn't necessarily bad, I liked having Armand, Marius and Pandora's stories expanded upon where they overlap. I'm skimming but I'm also glad this predates the AMC series since it debunks the actions of some of the characters so severely they may as well not even be related. Why does Daniel go from desperate for the Dark Gift to holding Louis in contempt? Why does Louis suddenly overindulge in decadence when he shunned it previously? They had to retcon core principles of the characters to justify them suddenly being actual assholes rather than deeply flawed, humanistic characters. According to this Anne wanted Louis to be a woman in Interview, so you could've gotten rid of all the pedophilic issues of Louis and Claudia's relationship by making Louis a mother figure in the more literal sense. If you're going to fuck with the original, do that. Be literal about their relationship as mother and daughter instead of father/daughter/lover/beloved and have everyone shit  on it. Then Kirsten Dunst can avoid having awkward questions raised. That would've been a conservative reading of the text. It takes great pains to mention Babette, there are big chunks of text missing from the movie the series could've easily expounded on.

At least the paper cleared up my recollection of Enkil's castration, I forgot they just assumed the roles of Osiris and Isis, it was this overlap with reality that stupidly led me to want to study Egyptian mythology to see if there was any basis of truth in the story of the twins. The paper rightfully points out of Anne white-washing the ancient vampires as being white and not coloured. I'm inclined to agree in her attempts to make a feminist statement with Queen of the Damned, she failed to really present feminism as necessarily good. I've always recognised Louis as Claudia's mother figure, again people ignoring that entirely because he's an older male is fundamentally irritating. Lestat doesn't shy from calling them a family. He doesn't demand Louis man up entirely, just make sure she doesn't misbehave. It seems progressive for its time but then adheres to normative gender roles anyway.

And Louis never has his own voice. Interview is third person narration, we're seeing a conversation between two people in a room primarily, it's not Louis's unique point of view. Lestat gets to speak for himself. Claudia also remains voiceless except through her diary entries. I don't know if Anne could inhabit Claudia's headspace adequately, I'm glad she didn't but someone made a graphic novel from Claudia's point of view instead. I wanted to like Merrick as it was "bringing back" Louis and Claudia but it's not entirely about them. It's a long-con for Merrick to become a vampire. I'd have rather Lestat turn Rowen and have her go nuts than Mona Mayfair. I'd still rather both "families" exist in the same universe independently than join up. It seemed like a weird combination to have the supposed heroes of both chronicles fall in love, and pointless as it goes nowhere and isn't brought up later. I still maintain it was a quick way of ending both series and just blew up because Amazon has no filter for reviews.

I figured out what was wrong about the documentary I saw. It was missing a very specific story from a man sitting by a camp fire about a local version of what we'd consider a vampire, and a week later it only occurred to me it was gone. There were two versions, the one I saw called the Vampire's Life (which Vimeo has and calls Birth of the Vampire) and the one I saw on Youtube. The Vimeo one is better synced as well, and a cleaner transfer, it's not missing bits, so now I know the YouTube one was cut down a decent six or seven minutes, which basically covers the native storyteller's sections, which is shitty because they were the best parts of the whole thing, and some other parts about Anne. I knew they cut some of the narration to so I'm bummed I didn't find this version first to watch the other day, but it's nice to know it's there. It's a shame the score doesn't exist anywhere for how haunting and beautiful it is.

After over 20 years of refusing to touch Vittorio, I bought it with the hope it'd be a kind of romance story of a younger vampire. I shunned it back in the day for being devoid of any attachment to the other books, there's a big point made about this, however it's already boring me and I doubt teenage me would read it. It's more a history lesson on Italy, and it's lifting a lot from the Lestat, Vittorio is from a wealthy family who owned a remote castle. This and Pandora were supposedly separate and possibly initial books in an offshoot series but I think they did so poorly by comparison she had to go back to the core characters. I'll probably take forever to read this, to be honest. If I do finish it at all.

I decided to do a tier list and I've already marked it as no. If I ever read the Atlantis book it'll be because I got too curious about it to ignore it. We didn't need the recent books but having read Prince Lestat, I had to give it an F. Some of the rankings are based on me remembering enjoying the book or not, so the top four were the ones I liked. I don't know if I read them now if it'd be the same. But it's looking bleak for Vittorio.

Firestarter and Magic Mike 3 - How to waste an afternoon crossing movies off your watchlist

I was mad at Netflix having nothing to watch (seriously, it actually feels like they have less content than they supposedly do just by looking at the home page) and found Magic Mike's Last Dance. I decided to put it on and say I've finished the trilogy but I'll never watch it again. I barely made it through the whole thing. The second sequel had some moments that were kind of funny but the drive for the crew to put on a big money-making show seemed rooted too deeply in fantasy and not reality. Which the first movie excelled at. The whole point being: Mike can make it on his own doing his own thing. The second movie assumes he can't give up stripping, the third assumes he can't even make it as a carpenter, and he still can't keep a woman in his life.

The conceit of the third movie is... what if Mike was Julia Roberts and Selma Hayek was Richard Gere? Mike's bottomed out and bartends at a rich woman's fundraiser, where he runs into one of the women he stripped for in the first movie. She happens to mention to the rich woman, Maxandra, that Mike's an ex-stripper and could give her a lap dance to make her feel less shitty about her divorce. Mike says she can have one provided she doesn't expect getting off. I don't remember "happy endings" ever being part of Mike's previous arrangements. He was a bit of a manwhore but not for hire, that made his character more compelling. All the gritty realism gets replaced with more polished fantasy. Mike and Max do this insanely over-choreographed routine before going to bed, it's very difficult to watch and take seriously, as the movie has to build a plot around these set-pieces, something the original didn't need to do and kept sensibly delegated to montages and establishing scenes. Soon as Max is offering Mike a "job" in London, you immediately see how this has turned into himbo Pretty Woman. Once they start recruiting male dancers and talk about stripping, all I could think was this is just Pretty Woman meets The Full Monty. In the midst of this they try to make a commentary on feminism and women having it all. All the while we're treated to a "narration" from Max's adopted daughter, who's writing a novel (of a whopping forty pages) about Max and Mike. It's kind of cute and it introduces a rather precocious, geeky looking girl into the story without her being involved in the "scandalous" parts, and Mike warms to her and could genuinely make a decent father to the girl. She barely considers Max her mother. But her novel reads more like an essay on the cultural significance of dance that intertwines Max and Mike's story. It's tied up neatly but it's a weird device to utilise by the third sequel. 

Max is insufferable and self-sabotaging. But allegedly she's made for Mike and they're destined to be together. So much of the natural dialogue is stripped out of this installment, Mike isn't that interesting, you don't care that much he fights with Max and their sexual chemistry comes from their compatibility as dancers and creatives, it doesn't seem to provide that much substance to their relationship. His other girlfriends were down-to-earth but they were also "girls", Mike needs a woman, and by the end of the movie she can't be his sugar momma cause she's broke, I'm assuming from the fines the council put on her for gutting a heritage building. The foils in this movie are actual laws that Max thinks she can circumvent with her money and are being used against her by her ex, or when Mike thinks if he just "woos" the stuffy conservative member of the heritage council or whatever she is with a bunch of hot guys dancing on a bus (that was the point I nearly gave up). I saw that coming, the good old "get to the heart of the mean, conservative bureaucrat that's threatening to destroy the big show so they bend to the hero's needs". The show itself is okay but their little dance for the menopausal members of the audience was barely watchable. I had this on in my periphery while I played Stardew Valley and I couldn't bring myself to watch it. Plus if you're going to have an extended dance scene with twenty minutes of rain effects in an old building that would clearly do so much more damage than already done, to have it bankrupt the main characters like it never mattered, don't expect me to care that much when the two leads finally kiss. It was awful. The original guys come back for a Zoom call, which is a COVID trope at this point when a lot of sequels were being stymied by the pandemic. Now it's just a lazy way to get previous characters involved easily. That was probably the absolute worst scene. We didn't need Magic Mike XXL. We definitely didn't need Last Dance. Way back when I saw promos and billboards for Magic Mike, I was so against it, I hate seeing male strippers, I hate the double standards of men being groped or getting away with dry humping women who are squealing like idiots. Shit men can't get away with when women are stripping (and I'm not saying they should, it's just sad we accept this dichotomy). I assumed it'd be cringe, but it was a fantastic drama, it had interesting stakes, it had an ugly underbelly to examine and it had genuinely humorous moments. It's a highly regarded movie. It ended nicely. Everything else, including the international stage show, was a cash grab. We didn't need the Magic Mike Trilogy.

Then I went to Amazon and put on Firestarter, which I've put off watching. The book is horribly boring, so I appreciate the film did a reasonable job of trimming off the boring shit. It was a slog getting through everything between Andy and Charlie being detained and them escaping. But Blumhouse being involved in this didn't make it that compelling. The acting's fine, the change of characters is fine. It's very whittled down. Also Charlie ends up with her parents powers as well, which is kind of lazy considering the point was nobody could predict Charlie would have pyrokinesis from the modified genes of her parents. In all honesty, she's more like Carrie when she's being bullied and finally fighting back with her powers, but it was too convenient to make her telepathic and telekinetic. She's also not endearing like Drew Barrymore's version, she's just the miserable, dark child stereotype that's been overused by now. (The 1984 trailer is basically a short movie that spoils the whole thing).

I liked that she's expected to save her dad rather than having her detained with him, however he doesn't want her to, he's obviously there as bait. I didn't expect Charlie to side with Rainbird, in the book he has a very twisted interest in Charlie which borders on pedophilic. In this, despite Rainbird being responsible for the mother's death, Charlie still takes pity on Rainbird and escapes with him. I think he mentions he considers her his kin as they both could've been used and she recognises this but not with much incentive to, in the book he spends more time emotionally manipulating her into trusting him until she no longer does. But the lack of budget also meant that all the big explosion set-pieces in the book and original film weren't done. The boring passages with the Shop workers aren't here but the replacements with Hollister (played by a black woman because fuck it, it doesn't matter) and Wanless, the doctor behind Lot Six, aren't all that interesting. We get exposition over Charlie being a potential WMD that Hollister wants to pacify and control, she's not going to make an army of Charlies (this line is delivered so badly), it's not particularly original. The 1984 version is pretty much faithful to the book, I saw it decades ago but don't remember a lot. This recent version feels low budget, it's not much of a cast, it's bare-bones, the effects look competent. Blumhouse movies are just that, reasonably competent but not the giant masterpieces, (outside of Get Out), nor do they need to be, I think they're okay with these breaking even. The Exorcist remake looks like utter dross I won't touch, but Firestarter isn't worth it, it critically bombed, and if Blumhouse's new model is just rebooting good to middling former franchises forever, I don't want to know about it. This is all terrible. I hope they don't go anywhere with either of these properties.

So, that was my afternoon barely watching two movies nobody asked for. Oh, and Magic Mike wasn't technically on my watchlist, I put it on for the sake of it to see how stupid it could possibly be and wasn't surprised.

We need to ban Disney from making movies personifying emotions.

Putting aside the fact Pixar/Disney depend on a lot of goodwill from fans and when they take chances with something "new" they always have something "familiar" in the pipeline to placate audiences, I don't see any need for an Inside Out 2.

I refused to watch the original. I just don't want to watch anything new by Pixar, I haven't for ages, the animation is kinda lazy, I don't enjoy them. I won't watch Up or Soul, to me they seem kind of manipulative and contrived. So when they did the whole "personifying emotions" angle, I was annoyed by it. It reduces feelings and memories down to digestible forms. So, bittersweet isn't a thing? (I suppose it is according to the lesson of the plot). Now I'm going to sound like Donnie Darko going on a rant about fear and love. It's a nice idea for a story, it's also reductionist. I guess it hinges on accepting sadness is necessary for life.

Now they've decided anxiety, ennui, envy and embarrassment are "new" emotions associated with puberty/adolescence. Which suggests none of those can exist within a child. I call bullshit, I had anxiety as a kid I couldn't accurately identify and I described as shame and guilt since I hadn't the tools to deconstruct my emotions. I know I get shit for  not watching a movie and forming an opinion but I won't watch this to see if I like it. I don't know why it bothers me other than neurodivergent kids might not relate to this, or best case they do and realise their anxiety isn't a healthy thing to be burdened with constantly and it's more common than people realise. You should only feel guilt when you've done something terrible, it shouldn't be a persistent thing that doesn't abate for weeks over something trivial. Embarrassment isn't the same as shame, you're more self-conscious as a teen so yeah, more embarrassment would be an issue but why not explore what shame (which would relate to disgust) is in comparison?  I'm asking way too much from this, I want people to know feelings are nuanced and complex, I don't think a movie that personifies certain feelings is going to address it. I guess it's not supposed to.

Okay, I found a really useful chart that shows which orbs can work together but I don't know if that's factored into the movie since one is actually anxiety, which they've correlated to fear and sadness. I don't usually attribute my anxiety to sadness, it makes me depressed if it persists and way before that it makes me angry and uncomfortable. I've seen people turn fear into aggression/anger, which leads to hatred blah blah... I think the original movie is more a metaphor for memories rather than emotions. It's nice you want to say you can't be happy all the time, but they also don't offer many other positive emotions, people are asking "Where's love? You're doing a sequel, where's that? Is it a reveal?" (To be fair they're only introducing four new emotions not five). 

It's a pretty way to dress up schema issues and core memories. I think most of us dump boring memories and mundane moments, so what's boredom (sorry, ennui) going to contribute to the cause? Ennui is usually associated with a sense of tiredness, so will we get lackadaisical as an emotion? I'm too busy granulating this entire premise instead of letting it live superficially. Which is why I can't watch them, I'll just be ranting, "Okay, but what about this?" I write and use synonyms for most emotions, I never say sad, I say lachrymose, I never say joy, I say exuberant. I'm a pretentious dickhead and this movie will annoy me. Is annoyed an emotion we can personify?

These movies aren't for me. I don't like Pixar's keeping sequels in the chamber for when original ideas don't do well. I hate Disney's remaking everything as a live action film cash grab. We get nothing new, and when we do, it's subpar because the effort goes into the existing franchises, and the "new" ideas bomb at the box office or wind up on streaming, so they need to admit those movies are intended as filler content for their platform, not as something designed to make a proper profit. Yes, they want to cultivate more, newer franchises, but we have to suffer a Frozen live action remake on top of a third sequel as well. I keep wanting these movies to fail so they'll just fucking stop.

I'm going to post this chart I found here because I'm so fucking fascinated and I can't figure out if some fan just made it up or if it was incorporated into the movie. Calling joy and anger "righteousness" is kinda silly, shouldn't that be arrogance? Joy and disgust wouldn't necessarily make "intrigue" unless you equate it to morbid fascination, but I wouldn't attribute joy to that at all. Sadness and disgust would make self-loathing, so anger and disgust would be loathing, that kinda tracks. I want to see how they incorporate the "new" emotions into this when you've already found anxiety anyway, and where does boredom and disgust unite, I can't even think of an emotion that can marry boredom and become something else, unless boredom and anger lead to destruction. People of course were asking where's horny, like that's even an option. Envy and anger would be very destructive, but where would envy and joy correlate? Or envy and disgust? See where I'm going with this, it's too hard for me not to over-analyse  this entire premise. Will the new movie be about how you can learn to live with envy and accept what you can't have? That's important to learn. Will it be that boredom leads to you being unpleasant to be around, so joy has to kick their ass?  I stopped watching someone's vid on why this sequel will "work" compared to others, so far anxiety having "baggage" is so relatable to everyone. We're not going to look at how you can have nervous excitement which is like anxiety too? Because people don't want excitement and anxiety in the same bucket. And we'll never get to the bottom of the very essence of mania. (I've also heard the argument the comment sections of Disney trailers are always positive and full of very superficial feedback so if I went in there saying something stupid and negative it might get removed or downvoted into oblivion, which is why I rant here and not there).

Yeah, I realised why I'm pissed about this, it's all people new to the mental health party celebrating a movie that validates their emotions. Yay, good for you I guess. Apparently Inside Out is also one of their "old" movies from 2015 (yeah okay 8 years is "old" if you saw this as a kid. My point is, this shit doesn't leave so it never gets "old" before there's another sequel). I feel like you're supposed to be excited for the emotion characters and nobody seems to care about the little girl growing up. But yeah, "The feel ennui movie of 2024". Ugh okay, Disney. Keep being "clever". (Also, is Ennui going to be a pompous, French existentialist with a beret? So far they look like a little emo bitch, way to miss an opportunity to introduce them to Camus and Sartre). And I'm not being represented by my core emotion: fucking cynicism. 

Also, also, I keep forgetting how the Endless in the Sandman books have made a much more fascinating examination of states of being in humans personified. I feel like people knew this had been "done" before so it was irritating to have people think it was a genius concept from Pixar. It wasn't just, "Oh, this is Herman's Head". There was also the Oscars just giving this Best Animated because it's a Pixar movie and popular, it had to trample on more interesting animations. I saw right through The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse from the trailers, too.

Matt Johnson as... Matt Johnson: BlackBerry

I finally saw the one movie I wanted to this year, I rented it off Amazon once it was marked down to six dollars from 25. I didn't really want to see this in a cinema, so this was my compromise.

I'm amazed how Matt Johnson can basically get away with playing himself in these roles. Given he's now playing a real person vs a version of a person who might shoot up a school, or might be involved in faking the moon landing, it was interesting how he played someone who existed and was also obsessed with references and movie nights. From what little I found, the real life Doug Fregin developed tech to streamline and speed up editing films so it's not a stretch for Matt to insert himself into this character. It helps this might also be people's first intro, not their second or third or fourth if you're familiar with Nirvana the Band the Show. He's perfectly capable of demonstrating tension in the middle of a lot of ADHD energy but it's still Matt. Maybe it was to protect Doug, who's already a recluse, he agreed to just play himself rather than via mimicry. The leads do the lifting and Matt's direction has really advanced. We still have some shaky cam moments but everything's cleaner and well constructed. It's taking a competent film maker and giving him the resources to really do something special. Jay Baruchel gets to demonstrate something more interesting than secondary friend of stoners. Glenn Howerton's let off his leash to damaging effect, you need someone who can go from zero to eighty on the anger scale without breaking a sweat (and making the fake tan run). Cary Elwes is fun. Martin Donovan gets another bit part when the man can do more than a lead in a Hal Hartely film or a guest run on Weeds. Eric Osborn (Miles Hollingsworth III of the pink pants and Degrassi fame) has a great small role cowering around Howerton, which suits him. I had fun. It met most of my expectations. I saw someone complain the BlackBerry name gets no mention in terms of origin, in fact I think the trailer misleads you that it's even given a name at the prototype stage. I don't remember Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs explaining why he chose Apple or Macintosh. Pirates of Silicon Valley is my tech bro origin story benchmark to this day. I try to remind myself it's not gospel and neither is BlackBerry or the Social Network, but the three have kinda become my holy trinity of tech bro evil developer biopics. I'm looking forward to the three part series that fills in the gaps, which is a cool way of not simply releasing a director's cut. Jay McCarrol's score is beautiful and fitting but definitely not a standout compared to Ross/Resnor's Social Network score. The soundtrack is a nice blend of bops that fit the time periods. I've had Elastica's Connection stuck in my head all day.

Putting some early bets on BlackBerry's awards, some Globes and Oscars would be nice. I'm seeing it clean up at a lot of indie shows.

Wild Things... Not what I remember

I've got next to no recollections of Wild Things outside of the mid-story twist Matt Dillon is in on it. But this is a nutty presentation. The way Denise Richards is interrogated by the female detective (who gets hit on by Matt Dillon later on, and she's also incredibly dumb and trusting of him, she doesn't even think he might be a rapist) with an inappropriately sultry voice asking what happened in a more pornographic way. This did okay critically, I feel like it's slightly above the trashiness of Show Girls. And I totally forgot Bill Murray is in this. I think things get kinda weird and wacky. It's not shot terribly, it's competently made, and campishly acted, Matt Dillon's kind of a himbo and I can't even tell if he's that good, he's got that dude-bro voice that makes Keanu less credible as an actor, but he's not the worst either. I kinda like Denise Richards and how she can talk through her teeth. Neve Campbelle was still trying to come out of her squeaky clean Party of Five era (I don't think she was that girl next door, Scream had done really well  but she was a bit sameish, she had these very distinct mannerisms and that classic little staccato laugh.). Kevin Bacon has a penis and we get to see it. I can't even remember how it ends. The score is actually very Twin Peaksy minor chord, Blues scale jazz, very Badalamenti. The main soundtrack is very late 90s too. It's got that kind of sharp, fast-paced editing. Once you know where it's going it's kinda predictable. I remembered the Bacon/Dillon connection but not the ending. It's just trash enough to be appreciated. It's campy but I feel like Dillon taking a boat arm thingy to the face and ending on a black screen works. Some reason we need a bunch of midcredit scenes piecing everything together kinda pointlessly, it really looks like a lot of outtakes, and this is after it's explained Neve's like a supervillain with an IQ of 200 somethin' who can put her mind to anything. I blanked all of the Bill Murray stuff at the end. It was more fun than I recalled. I just didn't commit much to memory at all. Sadly, we all missed out on the Bacon/Dillon kiss which I vaguely remember. We just get a mild gay/not gay penis on display moment that is clearly trimmed down. Of course there were the useless sequels we never asked for. But it wasn't the pile of insubstantial trash I thought it was.

Counting Crows... and Me.

I was lucky to have albums of songs I only wanted the singles from and ended up loving the whole thing. August... And Everything After was a mainstay on my stereo. I'm trying to chill to a podcast about Counting Crows, another band I never had anyone to share with. Lyrically, it was a little odd, mostly depressed but still uplifting in parts. Years later, I went up to a busker and gave him some money for singing Rain King. 'Round Here was in a book about songs that were needlessly depressing, and I disagreed with the statements, it's still a song I go back to and feel struck by it. (This podcast is annoying me because they can only play five second clips for copyright I assume, maybe it was longer on Spotify). There were so many other amazing songs but I went to school with the kids who only heard the singles, didn't listen to much outside Nirvana and Metallica, and here was me listening the closest thing I had to a country music album.

Recovering the Satellites hit harder and heavier, I stayed up listening to this through grade ten, while I was still in my home alone on a Saturday night where I was the most comfortable. My brother had moved out, I kinda just had the one end of the house to myself. It was ten pm and my parents knew where I was. Later I tried to make a list of the references of names and other repetitive themes, when I was in my list era. Another Horse Dreamer's Blues was something I belted out to get out of my skin. But that was all I had of them for a while. It was something that faded into the background but it was criminal to me Angels of the Silences wasn't massive.

I knew about This Desert Life and heard Hangin' Around but didn't pick it up until I was halfway through college. I played Colour Blind and the Buffy fan recognised it from Cruel Intentions. It brings up a lot of harder memories even with the lighter songs. I had it on when I was on the bus to Bristol, I got a laugh out of someone with the hidden track, Kid Things is such a bop. Mrs Potter's Lullaby is kind of a magnum opus song that's fun to listen to but seems to go on too long without overstaying its welcome, you can just see the whole song play out as a montage in a movie.. Wish I was a Girl is fun to sing (in the way How Can I Sing Like a Girl? by the Giants is fun - and I just remembered the cancelled show is this Wednesday). I wasn't enough into weed culture to listen to their shit stoned but I still loved it. They talked about Speedway and I totally forgot I knew it, there are a couple later songs I don't remember the titles of.

By the time Hard Candy came out, I was over the band but dying to see them live. I managed to catch them before they cancelled their tour in 2004. And the podcasters admitted to not being with the band for this either, it's another I didn't rip onto my laptop. I wasn't a big fan of Big Yellow Taxi. But I remember seeing some teens in the barely full audience having so much fun to the new album but just not vibing with the older shit, and I was kinda smugly dancing along to the classics. I was in a crowd of Green Day fans who didn't recognise Longview or the famous line I belted out obnoxiously on my own. 

I'm disliking this podcast, however. I found a live album for ten bucks so I got it, I think I saw it years ago and just decided not to buy it. I had to get by with my CDs and my Discman for many years, getting a job meant I could afford an iPod. That changed my life. But these guys completely glossed over Hard Candy, which is kind of hilarious, they just trashed Big Yellow Taxi and moved on, and I kinda was curious what their opinion might be but they were like, yeah, first two albums awesome, third okay, crap they're on the Shrek soundtrack. Oh they did a Joni Mitchell cover. The End. But they're right, not a lot of people talk about the Crows. I guess they're my Phish. You just don't get it.

Listening to the live album now, it's totally jarring hearing Round Here stripped down to a guitar and read out more like a beat poet performance, but it's growing on me. I just don't remember them doing this when I saw them. This is basically their answer to Unplugged but it's so stripped back, it's all folksy and maybe I could've previewed these first but this isn't bad. I stopped to check out Round Here's original version from Adam's previous band, and holy fuck this is an amazing song. Like how in the fuck did this not become an actual hit? Like I'm already spinning it again. Fuck me this is just the Crows if they were the Cure, but it's so fucking good. Fuck. Like, had I heard this in high school I would've been so fucking obnoxious about it not being on the radio. People would play the Crows version and I'd be like, nah man, this is the shit. Luckily it ended up on iTunes and I could actually buy it. Fucking hell. But I went to Catapult from the live CD and it's fucking amazing. I used sing this a lot, it was another thing I had to belt out in the quietest voice possible. I think I would've loved this whole thing had I bought it back in the day but I was kinda frugal with pocket money at times and must've assumed it was just a live rendition of what I already knew.

And now I've hit Mr Jones and you would've even recognise it. I can't stay up all night doing a blow by blow but shit, it's tempting to. Fuck I wish I had bought this in high school, I would've been obnoxiously trying to force it on everyone and they would've hated it. And they slip in the lyrics from Perfect Blue Buildings which isn't played (I love when Tori mashes up her songs like this). This is all just putting me in a bar in the Midwest right now. Rain King is just so languid and it's only hitting me now I would drive to this and just not come home again. (and they sneak in lyrics from Good Night Elizabeth, which isn't on here either). Mercury's about as close to the original as it can be. Ghost Train's heavier and darker than before. Anna Begins is also giving me the feel of how Tori really restructures her songs live and to be honest, more bands should fucking do this. Make new arrangements for the live shows, make something of a unique experience that you may not capture again. Anna Begins has more beat poet moments but it's still beautifully slow and romantic for how fucking miserable the song is. (Hearing James Van Der Beek sing this in Rules of Attraction is so funny). They tap out after that (so it's the end of disc one besides one song I don't know since it was part of this CD.)

I went through the second CD and it was less folksy and more rock, but the arrangements were still unusual. It has some cool moments, I'd have to give it a few spins to see if I really like it. Otherwise I don't know if I would be that interested in any current day material. I didn't go to their cover album tour, I liked I got to see them once and have them on my list of bands I wanted to see live.

Soundtracks and sound - my only access to movies growing up.

A guy reviewing a 4K restoration of Natural Born Killers reminded me how obsessed I was with the soundtrack, and how it followed me up until my thirties. I was standing on a station platform after a bad day at work waiting for a train, listening to Shit List by L7. (But Rock and Roll N-word just feels so uncomfortable to listen to now.) I've glossed over how I had to "watch" and access films as a kid. My brother stayed up one night to tape Batman off TV. No, we didn't have a VCR, he had a cassette player, and he'd sussed out that the two local TV shows were also simulcast on the radio on specific bands. This was how we got our music too, by the way. Saturday mornings, tuned into the ABC, watching Rage, trying to remember the chart order of songs so we could tape them. (This wasn't new either, tape recorders were responsible for recording music off the TV when it was a big reel to reel with a handheld microphone). So my access to songs I like was already hindered by time and not being by a radio when you needed to hear a song. It was hard enough missing episodes of shows, or not being able to stay up watching movies. The only way we could experience this shit sometimes was via a fucking cassette player. Logically, you only get sound. Also, you would've gotten the censored for TV version.

I rented videos, hoped for a day I could get the place to myself or I wouldn't be bothered, and played the movie while I recorded it onto a 90 minute cassette tape, my cassette player's tiny microphone sitting on a footstool up against the single speaker on our wood laminate Rank-ARena TV. And yes, I had to pause the movie and line it up with side B as seamlessly as possible. I also did this with one episode of the X Files, purely because David Duchovny was kinda hot he had a hot voice, and since it was only 40 minutes I used a tape that had recorded songs already on it, so it was sandwiched between songs. Blank tapes were something we were gifted often. (That was also how I ruined my science teacher's day by knowing how many chromosomes people have. I think about that a lot but I wonder if she remembers it and just hates me to this day). I would then listen to these tapes on the way to the big city on vacations, or I'd listen to my mix tapes or the tapes I got as presents. But with those movies, I also cut certain scenes, like the basement scenes in The Breakfast Club. I think I taped Grosse Pointe Blank off the radio and I was either about to leave school or had left. I did have our old TV in my bedroom at one point. I think by then I also had access to a VCR so I borrowed the Last Unicorn then made a cassette tape of it. Because of that, I also knew a lot of movies purely by heart, and by sound. The images wouldn't be accessible until I had money and could buy DVDs. I have fewer VHS tapes as these were about to be phased out, but sadly there's some shit I wish got released on DVD and never did.

Anyway, I also liked the Crow but could only watch the movie when we rented it out once. I loved most of the songs, particularly the closing credits song which everyone hated. But I new it well by the time I saw the film. Otherwise, I really liked the soundtrack and listened to it a lot in high school. Natural Born Killers came out in 1994, I'm pretty sure I had a copy of the soundtrack before the end of high school. And all the tracks were very artfully interlaced with audio clips from the film, which I know fucking backwards, however I don't know the film in its entirety nearly as well. And, I kinda prefer the soundtrack over the movie. It falls off a little towards the end, but I found the CD when I was in uni for about ten bucks from the market stalls that showed up on weekends. I've few and far between good memories of uni and that was one of them. I was on my own and I'd buy singles and listen to them off my Performa in my room while I studied. I also kept the same tape player I had since I was 9, and this went through some fucking shit. I miss it, I really do. The antenna snapped off it, the handle broke off it, but I could still tune into the radio and I'd wake early in the morning and put it on to wake up to and get ready for school. I didn't even want a clock radio. I fell asleep beside it waiting for Tori songs to play, I still tried to record songs off it, sometimes I did top 40 nights on the commercial network. I also had it on stupid late at night before we had access to Triple J the local commercial station played easy listening hits so I got to learn the words to the Pina Colada song. I had a weird fondness for that tape player, and I even tried to record my Storybook stories from it onto my iPad. I tossed it out eventually but I loved it to death.

It recorded all the shit I liked, I still have tapes I wanted to transfer, and even though I found all the songs off all the mixed tapes I made (and remade) through painless waiting and searching the internet, I cannot bring myself to throw these things out.

I was also the tool that bought soundtracks for that one song. When one of my tapes got twisted, I had a warbling version of Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes (mislabeled as the song Say Anything from Say Anything... it was a cheap knockoff compilation tape that used huge hit movies on the covers so you'd buy it only to realise they were covers basically, and I couldn't prove that, but I knew). And my only reference to this movie was this tape, and a reference in Leonard Maltin's compendium of movie reviews. You'd only get a star rating and a brief opinion and these books were fat. I didn't get to see the movie until my senior year. I didn't tape it from memory, but I also didn't know it was THE song Lloyd plays on the stereo. You hear it in the love scene, but it's iconic from that scene. According to Crowe, it was off some wedding tape he heard, it wasn't entirely vital or significant to him. The song actually playing is by Phish, from memory. But from that stupid compilation tape, I found my way to that film and wound up loving it. Many, many years later, I found the CD soundtrack at a market then stupidly never copied it to my harddrive, so, insanely, the actual main song of the movie isn't even possible to find on iTunes. I had to download a bunch of songs I liked from it and this one is like nowhere. And it was supposed to be the "hit" of the movie. It's perfect for the closing credits. But that fucking song is also the reason I own the Benny and Joon soundtrack, because my 12 year old brain thought the song was sung by Sting and HAD to be on the soundtrack from it being on the trailer. No internet existed for me to verify this and save forty odd bucks. It only had 500 Miles by the Proclaimers, which is fine, I liked it enough, and the rest was the score. Which has some pretty songs. But it also inspired my dance teacher to make a whole crazy future clowns in a playground routine for our end of year performance. So, In Your Eyes plays such a big role in my music history. I even remember finding So... in a university library, discovering the song was on there, then having to negotiate buying it off my mother from somewhere because we had a deal she could purchase something we couldn't afford then we save up to pay with our birthday money or pocket money. (Which, now I think of it, the pocket money was technically her money so we were just paying her back.) I loved So... but again, that one song and me go way back. My only experience of Say Anything for a long time was a bad cover of In Your Eyes. (It didn't go on my wedding soundtrack by the way).

Another soundtrack I stupidly owned was for Encino Man, I liked a remix of PM Dawn's Set Adrift on the movie, not on the soundtrack of course. But we were allowed to listen to CDs in art class and some guys liked to put it on for some reason. It had some okay songs. When I was broke, I ripped off three tracks, including Why'd you Want Me? by the Jesus and Mary Chain. The Clueless Soundtrack was just a good one to own but I don't have all the songs ripped. I think I sold it... (I might be lying, I stashed some CDs in a box in the cupboard). Singles was another good soundtrack but I remember liking the Hendrix song more from the movie, and this was one I saw a lot in high school so I loved Chloe Dancer to fucking death. (My theoretical future daughter would've been named Chloe after the song). Labyrinth was also my only access to that film until the end of high school when I taped it off TV. My nostalgia for that movie is overblown but some of the orchestral songs and Bowie's love songs are infectiously good.

What was amazing recently (as in the last five years or so) was finding Henry Fool and Amateur, both of which I adore on their own as well. Owning legitimate copies is important to me. I coped hard off Henry Fool. Also, for some weird reason, I was obsessed with the cartoon adaptation of Soul Music, it got me through my first exams, and there was a beautiful song in the last episode which just became another tiny snipped I kept on a tape from the TV to hear whenever. My ridiculous love of Caribbean Blue (which led to me owning other Enya CDs because I didn't know the name of the song and bought the wrong ones) led to me taping a snippet off an episode of Northern Exposure. I have a dumb love of LA Story only because her songs are in it.

Music makes a film, so if a soundtrack can kind of exist on its own and be heard and enjoyed separately from the film, it's special. They weren't just compilation albums. Finding the Heather's score off iTunes was interesting, they don't sound exact but having a polished version of the small fragments I stole off the TV and listened to endlessly, these became part of my collection. It's a HUGE reason I just don't believe in Spotify or any streaming. It doesn't have what I crave. I can't make a playlist that includes all my weird, eclectic songs from soundtracks and radio. I can play my random bootlegs. I'm very precious about how it's been stored, I panic if I can't find a copy of some songs. It was just too important to me. Those soundtracks and audio movies kept me afloat, my only misery was not having them all encased in a single box I can carry everywhere like I do now.

Perpetual strike

I'm on the side of the strikers whether it bones me or not. I want this creativity drought to continue for as long as it needs to. Because nothing new can happen. I don't give a shit about Stranger Things (except I wish it ended last season), I'm watching Killing Eve five years too late (I was also annoyed the author taped together four novellas to make a novel, I've considered doing this myself) but it's a great show. I disliked the ending of Flowers of Alice Hart, it fell so flat when it seemed to be gearing up to a huge revenge plot. None of the major shows on hiatus are ones I'm dying to see. I'm awful, I'm taking comfort in knowing no new adaptations or YA rip offs can exist while this is happening. I wasn't that shitty about Degrassi dying, that was a mild relief as well. I don't need to catch up on anything either. I don't want to pay for AMC or any Amazon adjacent packages. I don't want Disney+. I just want to watch Blackberry and I'll shut up, according to one half of Nirvana the Band the Show (something else I'd like to see if it's coming back) the movie will be released as a mini series with extra footage, which is cool. But that's the only thing I care about. Don't give a fuck about any Marvel/DC films, blockbusters are dead, originality is dead. All the great themes yadiyada 

It sucks for smaller people but the protections it will secure for writers and actors in the future is vital. Make it go as long as it has to. Make the studios suffer. It sucks Drew Barrymore had to pick the wrong side of history, let her and the panel of the View be a message to feminists not all your favorites will make the right choices. It's more I can chill for a while and not worry about seeing so many trailers for shit I don't care about. Oh no, no season 3 of Interview with the Vampire. Whatever will I do, what a fucking tragedy. Mayfair Witches is getting a season 2 but I can't see this surviving long, maybe it'll get curtailed before it's axed. The Weeknd is where we're at with "creative genius" right now.

I get to watch Red Letter Media make bullshit videos on YouTube and it's fun. Come hang on YouTube. Most of it's okay if you filter it properly.

If you make a musical in your show, I'll tap out.

I've already established I fucking hate musical episodes outside of the Buffy one, that I listen to and have bothered purchasing after a roommate gave me a tape copy of it. I really liked some of the songs, I hate Joss but he is quite talented as a musician. It's the only exception to the rule. Other shows doing it made me hate them.

Lucifer had one that was just based on pop hits, so that's a lazier way of doing it. But the one show that made me stop watching sadly is Bob's Burgers. I let the one episode go, but then the others had musical numbers, and the last time I checked out a clip, it had a musical number in it so I turned it off. I'm upset they did that, I haven't chanced watching it for years now and I was really enjoying it. I resented it. It's great you want to release an album set and make money but I don't see the point in having random musical numbers, even one every other episode. Every show attempted it and it made me viscerally angry. Yell at the screen screaming for it to stop angry. Turn off the TV or fast forward the scene angry. Degrassi had musicals in the show but they didn't do an episode despite the suggestion.  I skipped a lot of those scenes, it was more guilty of pushing student bands as a commonality of the high school experience.

I don't have much else it was more hearing that other shows did it whether I was watching or not, it annoys me it became a trend on shows that didn't need it.

Toy commercial shows

Cartoons from my childhood get shit for being half hour long commercials for toys. It's not untrue, however I don't remember watching a lot of My Little Pony. I've seen a few episodes I thought were the movie, I smashed them together in my head from having seen them a lot. What it was was the first couple of episodes. The movie was entirely different. And I didn't see them on TV, they were on VHS. I didn't actually watch a lot of cartoons as a kid. Astroboy was the one I actively watched all the time on TV, but I couldn't buy toys from the show, they were anime toys, I don't remember them being around. Pokemon came out when I was 18. Rocko's Modern Life was out when I was a teenager, again Nickelodeon shows didn't sell a heck of a lot of toys, which is why Avatar didn't do well. I saw one episode of the Dream Stone and love the theme more. I had to rent all the movies and cartoons I wanted to see. So my want for ponies was just a want I had all the time without prompting from the show. And I'm almost positive I had one toy or maybe a few before I saw the cartoon. The toy prompted me to watch the show. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was probably one I saw a lot too, but I had one April O'Neil doll (who I wanted to fly around on my baby Pegasus), my brother had the sewer and stuff. I gave my pillow case to my sister in law since I didn't want it, I think she thought it was a huge gesture when I'd rather someone who would love it to have it. I wish I could've traded my She'ra doll with someone who said they had her horse. I wanted the HORSES, including Barbie's horse. And most of my wants came from the advertising IN the toys, and joining the activity club for MLP. All toy packaging advertised the other toys in a series, MLP put in flyers for other toys you could order, I was lucky my parents did order some. People knew I liked them. I played in my room more than I watched TV since we had two channels and had to wait for school holidays for our parents to maybe rent a VCR for a week. I didn't need the TV to tell me to buy the toy. A lot of toys I wanted later were because of an ad I saw, not a show. There was no Sweet Secrets show, or a Finders Keepers show. I don't remember asking for any of those either, I don't remember the commercials. My grandmother came home with my first Finders Keepers toy. I remember seeing the packaging through the plastic bag as she came in. And again, I WANTED THE HORSE ONE. I got the baby version of that and the swan one I really wanted the adult version of.

I wasn't a Barbie girl, so when someone said she never had a baby, I swore there was a pregnant Barbie. No, that was Midge, and she had Allan, and they had nameless kids, I guess. Mattel can respond to demand with inclusivity but if the profits don't come out of the wash, they won't push it. My Little Pony course corrected on certain toys but they weren't politically driven, you had male ponies again maybe to push the boy market (pre-Brony) but it didn't work, and I don't think the boy ponies did well, as much as Ken didn't sell well. I think some mothers may have seen their daughters doing weird thing with their two or three Barbies and they needed Ken to balance out and combat a false idea of lesbianism being pushed. They still wanted to force a husband onto Barbie. I think if you had a Ken doll it was given to you as a gift, you never asked, because I genuinely don't remember asking for any of my Barbie products, especially not sparkly suit Ken, and his hairdo was very late 70s as well. I don't. I think I got exercise Barbie because I didn't do enough exercise (I still played outside). I think I got studio Barbie because maybe they thought I'd be a news anchor, but I swear, I do not remember asking for any Barbie product. And I never asked for my Blossom MLP, my first. It was given to me and I loved it and hated riding horses. I played with my Barbies but not much. I don't remember bugging anyone for a Birthday Barbie. I didn't like her 80s hairdo but her dress was pretty. Actually looking at pictures now, she's very late 70s as she came out in 1980. Did someone think I was supposed to look like that? I don't put on much makeup, I see a hairdresser otherwise my hair just goes to shit. I didn't watch any Barbie shows. There weren't any on TV, you had Gem which was supposed to subvert Barbie and failed anyway. And I hated Gem. I hated her look and her big hair and the theme tune, it was cringe before cringe was a thing. The Barbie moves all came out on DVD, there wasn't a Barbie show on TV when I was growing up. 

It's so easy to blame cartoons like GI Joe for kids wanting toys, in the US. I don't know how to explain to people we didn't get saturated with these cartoons the way US kids were, not when I was really little. If any show influenced kids getting toys, ironically it was the fucking Simpsons. We still got pushed toys for the show, the show had an episode about that, baby's first meta-commentary. I had a Lisa doll, Happy Meals and other kids meals had Simpsons tie ins. Heck, I had a couple of Roger Rabbit toys. I saw commercials on TV for toys, not a cartoon that made me want the toy. I did have a sizable collection of ponies as a kid, but it's doubled since I became an adult with a disposable income. And I didn't love any MLP generation in terms of the shows, I liked Friendship is Magic but I didn't love it. I liked the toys, I really enjoyed collecting them. And I liked they appealed to boys, I only wish they had been a chance to bridge a gap between boys and girls and not generated a version of an incel that was too cringe for incels. I wish the Bronies hadn't been so hostile to women like me who had an affection for ponies outside FIM. You have to explain to people, Bronies like FIM (Gen 4/4.5) specifically, they don't like any previous generation. And let's face it. Nobody likes Gen 5.

As an additional note, I feel like the biggest lie Saturday morning cartoons sold us in the 80s and 90s was the good guys always win and the bad guys will always face the consequences of their actions. That has never been entirely true. The bad guys run the jails, they run the governments. They have all the resources necessary to continue being evil and leave a legacy of evil in their offspring. The good guys are considered weak and ineffectual. Assholes almost always get away with the bag. The toys weren't the problem. It was the ideology that sucked.

Barbie - I'm sorry, Greta. I don't like your movies.

I'm really hoping nobody asks me if I'm going to watch the Barbie movie because then I have to explain I don't like Greta Gerwig as a screenwriter. I don't think she writes bad movies, she co-wrote Barbie with her husband, he wrote Marriage Story (I thought they co-wrote it) and she wrote Lady-Bird. She is a good director, she's done a bunch of great stuff. I only disliked the monologue in Marriage Story from Laura Dern, but now I realise that was unfair because that was her husband Noah Baumbach. It seems like they've both made some kind of long needed cohesion in the gender war whereby they've subversively shown everyone both sides are wrong and need to work together.

Throw everything I was about to say in the fucking bin, I like them. It was more my bitterness towards Marriage Story's plot and characterisation, and that I didn't like Lady Bird because I didn't like the main character and her strained relationship with her mother. Which was what made me uncomfortable.

Trouble is, I saw the speech from Barbie, and the way it's even framed is like, Barbie's Scarlet Johansson sitting looking up at the domineering Laura Dern, this time played by America Ferrera, as her character rants about how hard it is to be a woman. I know people like to hear it, but it's been said. It was a lot of regurgitated talking points from before Hillary didn't get elected. I was ranting at being called brainwashed for supporting Bernie and asking women, okay do you want a woman in charge or the right woman? Because just wanting a woman in charge isn't enough for me. I want Bernie because he's right for the job, if AOC were running I'd be rooting for her, not Hillary. But the clip is out of context to the film itself, which may be suggesting this isn't right either. This is why I chose humanism instead of feminism. I've been sick of this war between the sexes which just got repackaged as the wage gap. I'm sick of seeing women telling men they need to get a vasectomy without general anesthetic because they suffered through a birth. You're both wrong and right. Men need to speak up when women are in pain and being ignored, women need to remember men still suffer pain. You're never looking for equal ground, you're always kicking men and not the patriarchy, who's fucking both of us. Attack Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, don't attack men in general. Attack the ideas not the people. Men need to do better, we all need to fucking do better.

Sorry, Greta, I take it back I do like you just your movies aren't for me. If you influenced Noah's speech written for Laura, that's great, it's just I don't need a lesson on the Madonna/Whore complex. If he's conversely influenced you to be so subversive you might have broken people's fucking brains with a Barbie movie (I hope so), that's a good thing. People allegedly don't know what to do or how to react to the Barbie Movie and it's a good thing. It might've brought this culture war to a head. Guys are leaving their girlfriends over it due to not coping with sexism as a concept, little girls are asking "what's a patriarchy?". Maybe we need this. It's drawn attention away from Oppenheimer's rhetoric. If you don't know how to respond to Barbie, that's okay. It's just, I don't need what it's selling, I was tuned in before. Nobody's right. We need to start over.

Everything I suspected from what I heard was confirmed, I read Gerwig's entire approach to this and she specifically stated she wanted to make a humanist narrative. I'm sorry. She is a genius. She did do something subversive and new and different and she broke people's brains as a result. I feel like this movie can only make sense to humanists. It can only exist in the context of actual humanism. She borrowed from so many texts and concepts, there's a huge amount of intellectualism involved while still being in the realm of bubblegum comedies like Legally Blonde, which is also an inadvertent masterpiece. She's finally done what nobody has done to this degree. Please let this movie make a billion dollars. Please let this be an actual turning point in our basic bitch mentality around who's the better sex and admit everyone has a place and a reason and a purpose, and between us we can fucking figure it out. Let this be the thing that finally makes right wing idiots afraid of wokeness look absolutely stupid to everyone else. Let this be the reason we don't bring gender into politics anymore. Fuck. Barbenheimer has its on Wikipedia entry. This is important. I'll watch the movie eventually I've gotten enough from the plot synopsis and Gerwig's approach. Thank fuck this fell out of Amy Schumer's hands, sincerely I'm so glad she left the whole thing her brand of feminism is dumb and toxic. This movie didn't actually need feminism to exist. It needed a married couple who understood humanism on a base level and could finally package it as something wholly benign and sensible. That you can have your feminism and eat it too, ladies. Come hang with the humanists. We can get this shit done. You'll see. I see now why Ken took such a central part in the marketing. Of course this is weird to people who put up with gender norms without realising gender is becoming redundant on many levels. The Barbies don't defeat the Kens, the Kens don't enslave the Barbies. They deconstruct the utopia Barbie exists in. Gerwig's a genius. Give this woman more money and awards and let her make these movies. Fuck everything I said, don't listen to me. I don't know shit. She's amazing.

Now there's a weird phenomenon where darling movies getting Oscar noms are now being torn down as "not as good as people said it was", Everything, Everywhere being one example. Barbie's now back in the spotlight because of its lack of accolades and Robbie being snubbed while Gosling wasn't. It managed to get a Golden Globe for making a shitload of money. And yeah, maybe that's all it really did. Gerwig isn't up for Best Director, she's got to share Best Adapted Screenplay with husband ("adapted" because it's about an existing product, not original for being an original story, even though Critics' Choice recognises it as Original). Meanwhile, it's still up for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, it has two fucking Best Original Songs, Best Production and Best Costume. All of which I can accept based on what I know. Soon as people were shitty about Oppenheimer getting Best Hair and Make Up while Barbie, it only made no sense to me for a second. Oppenheimer has to transform actors into historical figures, and it's a period piece. You can't just make a bunch of women look pretty with nice hair and make up despite that being a facet of Barbie as a doll. Sorry, again, it appears this is where the film is actually lacking. The costumes and production design do look deserving of acknowledgement, from what I saw, an immense amount of effort went into those aspects. I thought all the others made sense, but yeah, someone's pointed out how contradictory the screenplay is, and Gerwig failed to get her point across as a director, so I don't think these are bad decisions. I'm not sure about Best Supporting Actress for America Ferrera, from what I saw, she was just reading out Twitter rants in her speeches. I should watch the movie but the same time I can see myself just cringing at so many points I'm supposed to be uplifted by... kinda like when I watched fuckin' Wonder Woman. They probably are going to age poorly for all the hype they had about being feminist/female-centric productions. I don't think the Oscars have fucked up on this one. I don't think Billie Eilish needs another Oscar, so it will be funny if the Ken song wins, as it's also doing better awards-wise. Insanely, it's smacked the Grammys in the face with so many options it's kinda scary. It's doing well at feminist based awards ceremonies, it'd be kinda weird if it didn't. But this is where I rip my hair out over "feminist" movies doing "well", they just don't get picked apart the way they should be.

Having said this, the backlash is now apparent and I'm halfway through a video justifying why Barbie might actually be a mediocre movie. The person's made good points (I'm ignoring their pronunciation of a lot of words, people really are in their saying words how they sound era) and they've compared America Ferrera's monologue to other movies, I wish they'd also included Marriage Story as it proves they're into writing "mouthpiece" characters who are quite rounded and relatable but are still standing up making a huge, impassioned speech about how hard it is to be a woman. (I persistently forger Noah wrote and directed Marriage Story, reason being is that part feels like a Greta moment). The movie revolves around political talking points, there were other ways this movie could've been presented with more interesting ideas but I think if Greta had been too nuanced it wouldn't have been received that well. It was already contentious as to how good it was, people were lukewarm. So now I know I'd be going into a very predictable movie with a lot of talking points, I'm less inclined to see it now. I think I'd cringe because you're not selling me anything new, it was only new to women under 20. So I don't think she's this amazing writer that should get more awards. I think the awards shows are basing their decision on this not being a standout movie or script. It's a shame. I think having other people come out and argue it was snubbed for awards is also incredibly misguided when the only thing it has to boast about is box-office sales. And they made an award just to reward it for that so people wouldn't get mad. I can't see Gerwig and Baumbach becoming a powerhouse couple who can be relied upon to keep writing successes. It appears Greta can't world build because she's never had to create a new environment. That's not her fault it's not up to writers to write new worlds, but she's never worked in a new world so it seems like she could only base Barbie within a framework of reality alone. So they had to pull the "don't think about it too much" card once the world dynamics are brought into question. It's an existential movie that doesn't want the audience to "think too hard". That's so stupid. Especially when the writers admitted themselves said, there's no story here, there's no character. It's why it's been so difficult to get it off the ground. But there were stories to draw on, and it wasn't given to the right people, so Amy Schummer was probably just as bad but maybe she had a story. Gerwig and Baumbach are very specific directors and writers who write intimate movies and they foolishly used this as a vehicle for a message they've already explored mulitple times in other films. 

And it appears Gerwig signed her husband on for the whole thing, didn't tell him, left him to find it out from the press, then he couldn't fucking escape. Is it possible they could've been close to divorce over this? That's icky. That's such an icky concept roping your unwilling partner into a project without asking, or if they did ask and the partner said no and they still did it anyway, and clearly didn't ask because they were sure the answer would be no... you know, how MEN ROPE WOMEN INTO SHIT WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT BECAUSE MARRIAGE. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK? I really want to raise the role-reversal theory on that, like if James Cameron roped Katherine Bigalow into a whole ass, major production against her will and she'd tried to get out of it and couldn't, people would be fucking outraged. But when Greta does it, it's somehow cute and hilarious. Honestly, I know this sounds mean and I think they have a reasonably solid relationship, but I would still find it hilarious if that destroyed their marriage. They have a very obvious communication issue that was explored in Marriage Story, so was this a cry for help the way Angelina and Brad did a movie about a disintegrating relationship right before theirs disintegrated? It seems kind of subliminal that they can't communicate unless it's via creating a project and exploring the issues in a fictional arrangement. Now I'm just fascinated by them as a couple.

Nothing about this is actually humanistic. Not if the very concept and development of it wasn't even founded on a fair arrangement between a man and a woman who wanted to genuinely work on it. You had to drag a man kicking and screaming into its development, and then the only man who carried in terms of acting is the one getting rewarded directly. Congrats ladies, y'all done played yourselves again. (I know America Farrera has been nominated for supporting, and supporting categories are valid but it's not fair for Margot, according to everyone else. I'm more inclined to disagree than before. I don't think she deserves a nomination, and I don't think Gerwig should be given any best director nominations. Unless the competition was that much weaker, then it wouldn't have been earned). Anyway, I have flipflopped on my approval of Greta so hard during this whole thing and now I've gone back to not liking her. I don't think she's a genius for making a humanist movie because I don't think she's succeeded in bridging the ridiculous divide between the genders at all. It hasn't solved the wage gap, and I don't think she particularly cares if abortion rights exist or not. Best you could do was say women deserve better. Wow, big statement. Much progress.

Not in my country - The insanity of the Nanny State and rating systems

Australia is a more heavily policed country in terms of censorship. For all our "casual" racism and blatant disrespect of the English language, and our ability to use the C word in a myriad of situations both positive and negative, you would think we'd be chill about censorship.

We're not. I saw a movie that I shouldn't, that got a prominent reviewer arrested for trying to screen privately. We have video games missing scenes involving anal probing that had to be covered with a cartoon picture of a koala. We police a lot in terms of content for children that grown adults should have a right to see. We live in an actual Nanny State when it comes to being able to see what we want, it's so conservative, even with that government being ousted, that one department is still stuck in the 50s. We're lucky they don't police "socialist propaganda".

So, when I see someone erroneously claim a movie I saw frequently as a kid has swearing in it, and I know it doesn't, I get kinda mad.

Never-Ending Story has a cut where we see the janitor invade the attic and mutter some expletives after tripping over Bastian's mattress. I found it online as I knew for a fact this wasn't in the release I saw. I also watched it at five, and loved it by six or seven. I wouldn't mind if it was remade, I think it deserves a better version. I only recently bought the soundtrack, really this saves the movie in many regards. Artax's death is impactful but the reason I probably coped with death as a concept early on. I did wonder if it was appropriate for my sibkid to watch but when they saw my AURYN t-shirt they said "Why's everyone so obsessed with this movie?" and I was like, you go, kid. Assert your independence don't go with the group think. I don't know if they'd like Last Unicorn or Labyrinth or Dark Crystal (the last two were caked in nostalgia for me but not that great to watch as an adult, Dark Crystal is legit boring and Labyrinth is cringe). What I can remember is dialogue, so if you're telling me Bowie dropped a couple S bombs and I didn't hear it, I'll challenge you on it. I wanted to give feedback to this website (I thought the movie was G rated, it wasn't) that the scene they mentioned isn't in the US release so you can't just say that shit unless it's included with bonus features. Don't tell tales out of school about my movies. I kinda also hate parents who can spend time doing this but it's a tool for others, I don't know what's age appropriate anymore because the ratings system was gamed to sneak more shit into PG movies. It's also fair there are tits in this, and some gruesome imagery I did find questionable as an adult. I just looked at the page for Hocus Pocus and it bothers to mention product placement for a candy bar we don't even fucking sell here. Most of the humor in this is for adults anyway. I remember watching one of the lesser Addams Family sequels with some six or seven year olds and there was a ball and chain reference one girl asked me about. I don't remember what I said. It's such a parent nudge/wink joke. Pixar didn't invent movies with adult content for the grownups to enjoy. I'm thinking this website is borrowing from a US source anyway, you can't expect people to watch all these.

But Last Unicorn is NOWHERE on this site. Considering they had to rerelease it to replace where the word "damn" is used, (I had the US release as well as the region 4 one and we didn't censor it and it is G rated). The website also has shit I've never heard of or things like Boy in the Striped Pajamas which I'd never show to a kid anyway. But not this? Did it really fly that far under the radar over here you completely forgot to add it? It's a fucking cartoon. That was how you tricked parents into renting stuff like that for you, it's animated so it's for kids! It's also how we were tricked into watching Watership Down. It's animated! It's for KIDS!

I think it's also been set up by gen X parents and you're telling me none of them saw Last Unicorn? Wow. I'm astounded. Watership Down isn't on here either??? Were they like banned from video stores eventually?? I'm so confused.

Autistic Coding in Little Man Tate

The more that comes up about the true aspects of Autism, the more people start to view others, real or not, as being autistic. I don't tend to apply it to real people, I also don't tend to apply it to characters who were definitely not written as Autistic, if you wish to, go ahead. But be prepared for people who loved the character but hate ND kids to get mad.

I wish more people knew of Little Man Tate, which is such a sweet little gem of a 90's movie that was so original (Yes, there's a bunch of problematic language used, I won't deny). I've always loved it, always identified with Fred's isolation, only we differed by way of needing social acceptance.

Fred is gifted, which isn't a phrase kids get anymore. He can read before most kids, and remember being born. He has the intelligence of a grown adult, but as David Hyde Pierce's character says, "It's not so much what he knows, but what he understands." Fred can read adults better than they can themselves, he perceives dangers that are real but nothing he should be so worried about as a little kid. And while his mother Dede knows how special he is, she longs to give him a normal life. Nothing about the film glorifies intelligence, Fred is celebrated to the detriment of his own psyche. The more he's allowed access to the adult world, the less it seems to support him. He can't trust any adults to simply be there for him, aside from Dede.

Dianne Weist's Jane is Dede's polar opposite, and the two are at constant loggerheads on what's "best" for Fred. In the end, both of them are right, there's a happy medium where Fred can thrive but still foster his abilities and talents. It really ends with "all kids are valid and special in their own unique way".

But you can take all of Fred's attributes and explore it from the logic of Autism. Succinct memories of infancy, persistent inattentiveness and hyperfixation are all evident. Fred picks apart the world around him to make sense of it, mostly by trashing electrical appliances to see how they work. He finds himself immersed in paintings, more from the emotions evoked by the painter than the beauty of the painting itself, he understands Van Gough's loneliness by a white lily in a painting. He worries about becoming an old man by a hormonal imbalance. His nightmares are those of a grown man fearful of his own madness. His wisdom is a burden for him. He's also surrounded by supposedly neurotypical children, and he can't get by in class, he has pathological demand avoidance issues by way of playing the piano piece backwards for his imbecilic teacher and confuses her when he says all the numbers on the board from zero to ten are divisible by two. He's bored in class but he wants friends like the biggest bully in the class. He craves their simplicity but he still expresses himself through intricate art. He even parents Dede by telling her how to run the finances and writing her resume, as she's perpetually struggling to hold down a job, and she disappoints him by selling his piano when she's tight on money. 

All of these hallmarks are reported by Autistic adults when discussing their childhoods. There's isolation, or pretending to be someone else to fit in, or relentless bullying for being "different". But it's not like Fred finds solace by being with his peers. When he's finally in his supposed element, he's still ignored and isolated, stuck in perfect geometric spaces completely alone. He can't engage with the activities around him, he chooses to play by himself making an intricate toy from stolen resources, and Jane is responsive to this as it mirrors her lonely childhood. She thinks she can be the mother he should have had all along, but when she fails, Fred is more resentful. She's misunderstood his needs, that Dede is better aware of. Jane celebrates he's not a normal kid, Dede unable to share that, she sees the pressures he'll face in college and needs to support him realistically. The kids that go on Jane's trip make friends with Fred but don't really engage him one on one, aside from Damon, the Mathemagician, who offers Fred a better perspective on the world. I constantly quote the quote by Shaw he uses about unreasonable men. Damon doesn't care if he's hated, he doesn't respect Jane but puts up with her obsession with writing about him and making him a reflection of her brilliant school. Damon didn't get a normal childhood, now he wears a cape and recklessly rides horses and behaves like a combative brat, his demand avoidance much more advanced for how lenient people are towards him and his prodigious talent. He hates Fred presents a threat to his popularity, however. But Fred is so desperate to be friends with Damon because he's found a kindred spirit. His experiences of idolising another and vying for attention is another trait in some autistic kids. They crave resonance with others, they need connections but don't know how to read where someone might refuse it so they express devotion which is never returned. Damon coming to like Fred in the end is very sweet, he's at Fred's birthday party tricking the kids and being a mischief.

Fred doesn't belong in college either, here his isolation is much bigger, all the students treat him like a weirdo outcast but try to cheat off him when they realise he knows more. Eddie befriends him out of guilt for hitting Fred in the head with a globe (I saw the trailer before I saw the movie and the way it was cut seemed to suggest Fred suffers a severe head injury since he's hit with the globe, then later you see him fall to the floor in his chair after he's swinging on it and I thought he was having an epileptic fit), however this is a transactional friendship and Eddie feels like he's done enough giving Fred a fun day out. Once again Fred misreads this and expects Eddie to be there all the time, he's let down by Eddie castigating him for showing up at his place unannounced expecting they're going to play pool. Eddie means well, but Fred only needs to be stung once by people and he will walk away. Rejection sensitivity is a massive problem for autistic kids, it affects them on such a deep level it causes trauma-like responses they struggle to reconcile, where as most neurotypical kids would bounce back from the same rejection or at least have enough friends they can shrug it off.

I don't think you can even dispute Fred is Autistic, (likely with inattentive ADHD). Hyper-intelligence isn't predominant but Autistic kids tend to understand adult concepts well before their peers, they're above average but struggle in an environment from sensory overload and an impending sense of doom other kids just don't experience. You just want to hug Fred and tell him he's perfect the way he is, and he deserves to be happy, and things will be okay. He doesn't have to get a job by thirteen in the tech industry or be a Doogie Howser-type, he can play with trucks and it doesn't make him a dullard like other academics might suggest. He can write his wonderful poems and make his art and not be mocked. You don't see Fred engaged by TV unless it's an adult show. I tended to sit in front of university education shows because there was little to watch on TV and I wasn't on the commercial station. I absorbed a lot of things and said things that impressed people, I responded better to adult humor. I never fit in, I insisted on solo play to avoid sensory overload from bossy kids. I liked being left alone and playing by myself. And I'm still Autistic. It's not disingenuous to depict Fred as just wanting friends to play with. Eventually he gets his wish without sacrificing anything, and when he realises he's not the top kid at Jane's school anymore, he doesn't care. He's happy. It's such a triumphant ending for how much he goes through, it's a big journey for a little kid.

You don't diminish anything by saying Fred's Autistic, it's not a tragedy, it's not something that needs medicating or modifying. This movie is a celebration of autistic kids well before its time. I think people should watch it before they sit down to Rain Man or Music, both of which were made with good intentions and completely failed autistic people.