I’m the cup of sunshine you didn’t order, but are too shy to send back.
Twitter post by @011scenes: “there’s no stranger things without her sorry”
Well, yes and no. While 11 is the catalyst for much of the overall plot – the writers can’t seem to have the character do anything besides scowl, stretch out an arm, and grimace until her nose bleeds black.
Sure, Stranger Things doesn’t exist without her (narratively and well, literally, I suppose) but Stranger Things doesn’t know what to do with her either.
It’s been a while since I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and I was reminded of it when I just watched A Trip to the Moon the 1902 silent film by Georges Méliès.
The wizard/scientists fall asleep on the surface of the moon (as you do) and are awakened by snow, created by what appears to be Saturn, a whole other crescent moon, and friends. My mind immediately connected this with the poppy field in Wizard and how they are awakened by snow flurries created by Glinda the good witch. Had any one made the connection before?
I started looking then thought, wait, am I remembering the film or the book. In the book, Scarecrow and Tinman get a sleeping Dorothy away from the poppies but leave Lion behind to “sleep forever” until some grateful mice heave-ho him into the grassy field, safe from his opium dreams.
OK then, moving on.
www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/fortnite-epic-games-lawsuit-addictive
As someone who gets time-blindness playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or manga, these kids are escaping reality and I don’t think that’s quite the same as addiction.
Games, especially those with micro-transactions, are built to keep the player playing and paying. Anybody been to Las Vegas? Though I can spend hours and hours playing a video game, I got bored after five minutes playing the slots. Casinos are set up to keep you playing. They are logistically set up to keep you inside, but it never felt like a place where I wanted to stay.
It’s immersion, that’s the draw. Why do we want to be distracted from the rest of the world? What is it (the world) offering these kids right now?
I agree these kids are dealing with something; I don’t know if the video game is problem or just a distraction from the real problem.
Obviously, no account of someone under 18 should have any kind of credit card attached to it. If a player can’t be in a legal contract with a bank, they shouldn’t be in a financial contract with a gaming company.
There’s got to be a few, right? I’m not saying there’s not, but anything?
Sometimes research takes you in weird places. Honestly, I’m taking notes on Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds and in disagreeing with a scholar’s opinion — well, part of the opinion, or actually the way the opinion was stated, fine, I didn’t like the tone of the opinion, okay??– I came across an abstract about Nocturnal Animals the 2017 Tom Ford film that I only know from TikTok.
I think it’s TikTok, or Instagram, the meme where you go to Netflix and watch the first few minutes of the movie and record your reaction because there’s nothing more shocking than fat bodies moving. Oh, wait, naked fat bodies. Eww!
Fuck you.
Anyhooos, I read the plot in the Wikipedias because I’m never spending money on that film and in the references list came across Victoria Coren Mitchell’s amaze-balls review: “I’m so glad to spoil this film for you” in The Guardian.
Director Tom Ford, a fashion designer by day and a film-maker with a gorgeous aesthetic touch, can make anything beautiful – and he really does it with these cadavers. The whole image could be hung in an art gallery, if it weren’t for the risk of flies. They look exactly how a pair of raped, murdered women wouldn’t look. But if you want to believe that a pair of raped, murdered women would be a lovely sight to behold, then Nocturnal Animals is the film for you.
Mitchell
And this, on that opening sequence of fat women existing:
On and on the dancing goes; we really get to have a good old goggle at the undulating folds of flesh. This is Ford’s David Lynch moment, but, in the darkest room of Tom Ford’s psyche, you don’t get dwarves speaking backwards, you get fat women dancing. Yeurggghhhhh, look at their rubbery tummies, their flabby thighs! Make it stop! Monsters! Fat fat fat fat fat!
And that’s what you get when you let a f***ing fashion designer make a film.
Mitchell
Hats off to you, for an unwavering review that says the quiet parts out loud. This movie sounds like shit. It reads like shit. It may have wonderful performances, but it’s probably shit.
Also, fuck Tom Ford too. Just all of it.
While I was transcribing my notebook today, I came across this paragraph I wrote about the first chapter of Richard Miller’s Writing at the End of the World:
Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is discussed in detail and while I’m pleased we found the time to discuss a female writer, I’m saddened that her story has to be about hope generated through the expression of her psychological and physical trauma and that her contribution is about forgiveness. Thank goodness for the lady nurturers. “It might seem that by organizing these readings in this way, I’ve been building up to a spirited defense of the social and therapeutic value of writing one’s memoirs” (24). Reader, he is not. Amis, Krakauer, Descartes all new that writing could exemplify, amplify their anxieties: “extend one’s sense of despair and one’s sense of superiority” (24) but they lacked the knowledge that Karr had, that writing could generate hope and forgiveness and an understanding of one’s own past and path. Miller forgets to point out that men often have the space, time, leisure to amplify their pain because the women compromise, cajole, and cooperate. Karr finds hope and optimism because she is not allowed the space to brood and sulk in the literary world. Her pain isn’t vented through literary doppelgangers or shooting sprees—it burns until it’s contained and only valued when her trauma is transformed into that most useful of all stolen artifacts—hope.