Monsters Ink

kind of a mixed bag, all things considered, but, y'know, you don't find gold if you aren't willing to dig in the muck. notable highlights:

girl with hyacinths (depressed antifascist lesbian noir),

resurrection (exhausting, exuberant fairy tale collection by the director of the transformative long day's journey into night),

gilda (a bisexual hate triangle that simply must be seen to be believed),

thunderbolts (the mcu gets its groove back in a shockingly kind movie)

blood & donuts (indie canadian vampire movie that is neither fish nor fowl)

the sweet smell of success (tony curtis in a creepily psychosexual relationship with burt lancaster)

a little behind schedule because i got too sick for movies but here's the list for february

notable highlights:

underworld beauty: early seijun suzuki yakuza flick with just impeccable vibes

olivia: lesbian schoolgirl/teacher melodrama that manages to have both the obligatory death and ruin AND an ambivalent happy ending, if you're rooting for the student/teacher thing to last

cannibal mukbang: incredible vibes cannibalism movie that doesn't *quite* stick the landing, but my god if you want a triple bill with ravenous and raw, here's your huckleberry

miami connection: way better than it has any right to be, despite its reputation as one of the Worst Movies of All Time

m butterfly: real slow burn anti-romance from david cronenberg that's body horror by way of the closet. surprisingly blunt in its anti-colonialism

"I want to create something as good as that!"

It is important to see terrible things in order to inspire your own endeavors.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

🏳️‍⚧️ TRANSGENDER DAY OF VISIBILITY 🏳️‍⚧️

If your protagonist is a fighter or magic user, do you show other women in those roles? If your society is more relaxed about sex discrimination, have you built a world that looks like it?

Have you built a world where your female characters don’t all have to be The Best At Everything, or is almost every female character placed where she can be extraordinary next to a bunch of male counterparts? Are you comfortable letting a female wizard or warrior be average or unimportant, or does she have to be one of the most skilled and powerful of them all, able to match or best all the men around her? On the other hand, are you comfortable having a female wizard or warrior be indisputably the most skilled or powerful out of the wizards or warriors, without drawing attention to her gender, placing her in competition with men, or having her be an exception to the rule because she’s female?

Are you letting your female characters be mediocre and un-extraordinary? Your world is full of powerful sorceresses, fierce battle maidens and calculating noblewomen, but do women do things in this world other than be Exemplary and Great and Awesome? If you’ve established that women do business and fight, do you have female soldiers carousing at bars and vaguely dull female Evil Minions Of The Dark Lord bumbling around doing evil bidding and female apprentices slacking on work or is every background woman we see competent and controlled and intelligent and doing whatever it is she’s doing without error, whereas only men are allowed to be foolish, impulsive, mess things up, or just be shown unflatteringly during the couple sentences we know them? In other words, does the world show women being unapologetically human beings or are all your female characters basically making up for being women by not doing anything that would badly represent their gender?

Scorpion-tailed spider, Arachnura sp., Araneidae

Instead of a cutesie reference to film censorship it was an explicit statement of defiance of Maryland's criminalization gay sex, which was not repealed until 2002. This wasn't a guy saying "Oh they can't put what I do in the movies according to a completely voluntary industry code" he was saying "The State of Maryland wants to put me in jail for being gay and having gay sex."