#smurkark

I remember reading this article and being astonished at many things, but especially a house that costs 50K. In Toronto, that would buy you a cardboard box by the train tracks, barely.

But also, 'white working class' I wish I were white working class

right?? why am i not a midwestern electrician. what went wrong

baking-soda replied to your post “technically i do know that in american newspapers “working class” does...”

As a life long member of the COASTAL ELITE I have never been able to own a car or a home and when I worked I made literally so much less than 60k a year that's like.....unimaginable lol

HES 23!!!!!!

Wow what an inspired question, I have so many for the dying part that I will just go with the most recent, “Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead” by the Turnpike Troubadours

About living and life, “Death Is Not the End” by Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan and Kylie Minogue and PJ Harvey

In the interest of full disclosure I totally made Sarah rephrase her PM via ask bc I knew I was going to talk forever!

So there are several extra criteria I’m using to judge this movie, and these are, including the standards:

1. Plot - do the writers and directors do the best they can to unfold a story, even if they are limited in certain ways, perhaps legally

2. Acting - did Timothee Chatroulette and Steve Carell do a good job (this was the easiest, bc honestly they did)

3. Does the plot, in its totality, tell a good story; is it worth telling

4. The cinnamontography

5. Assuming you told the story as best you could AND it’s worth telling, did you do ~due diligence~ to make sure the sensitive aspects of your plot were as accurate as possible

That in mind, the writers and director of Beautiful Boy did the worst job they possibly could in terms of story-telling. So, listen, if it were me, I would base the entire movie completely off of Nic Sheff’s memoir(s), which is trashy meth art. He writes well enough, and it’s almost touching because he clearly wants to emulate all these gross male authors like Bukowski but he can’t because he just likes women too much by his nature.

That aside, Nic’s memoir(s) is where it’s at; it’s pretty literally sex drugs and rock n roll, but written by a dude who is, for once, too shy to gloat about it. The mainstay of all of Nic’s books (and his father’s) is a character he named Zelda, because of course he would name her that. This woman is in her late 30s when Nic is in his early 20s, she’s a hardcore junkie and a one-time actress with a famous uncle, and everyone has long figured out she’s most likely Lala Sloatman, the niece of Frank Zappa. She had dated Corey Haim and later, the lead singer of the Black Crowes, who is (most likely), the ex Nic repeatedly mentions as the spoke in the wheel of his sordid affair.

ANYWAY, Lala Zelda is a recurring theme accompanying all of his relapses. The only reason I can think of for her glaring absence from the movie is a lawsuit? Which seems odd, because she had never sued Nic or his dad over the use of her poorly disguised image in their books. Without her, the story is bare and it’s boring. And I mean, I’m a drunk, so I can say this - there are approximately 100,000,000,000 published addiction memoirs out there, and nobody cares unless yours has a special angle. You’re lucky to have a Zelda in your narrative. Maybe they thought Timothee + much older romantic partner = too soon? I doubt it, though.

As I said earlier, Timmy and Steve did a good job, although this was honestly a waste of Tiny Tim’s efforts. Okay, to be honest, I really don’t give a fuck about addiction stories from the POV of the family. Save it for Al-Anon, you know? You’re profiting from someone else’s torment, and tbh there are very few people who are usually not directly complicit in their kids’ crippling addictions.

That said, David Sheff seems to be one of those few. He tried so hard and got so far, and in the end it doesn’t even matter bc Nic just loves meth and Zelda too much. If the narrative were eloquent enough, it could have given Carell the proper vehicle to carry the story. This was not the case.

This movie was supposed to be an amalgam of David and Nic’s memoirs; instead, it seemed to be almost neither. David is a respected journalist and he wrote a decent account of his perspective of his son’s addiction; maybe if the director and writers committed to any one side if they couldn’t handle both, they could have ended up with an elegant father’s lament, bc as I said Steve Carell really was good. As it is, they failed both the actors and the real people behind their roles.

Is this a story worth telling? Yes, if you’d done it right. I literally hate all addiction movies because they inevitably glorify AA because they don’t do their research. I mean, BB did try by having Steve Carell effetely repeat “relapse is part of recovery,” until surely everybody but the densest person could tell that’s a hideous phrase; but neither through the 2-hour-long movie nor in the end, i.e., in their fade-to-black postscript, did they bother to suggest that we need to support anything other. Which is funny, because I have literally read articles Nic Sheff has written arguing against the US’s current AA-driven rehab model.

So, to sum up, they made a boring movie that said nothing new about a sensitive subject when they had at their disposal the trashiest material ever and the perfect peachboi to execute it.

I remember nothing about anything and they’re currently writing a bestseller about me called The Most Unreliable Female Narrator Ever, but, just off the top of my head:

1. That moment in Season 3 when Syfy let them say “fuck” and its various permutations whenever they wanted and Sera Gamble & Co. just kinda went nuts with it

2. Margo telling Penny to find her a horse because she wants to “get [her] Catherine the Great on.” Which is a horrible and misogynist historical rumor but also hilarious

3. The “Under Pressure” musical number

4. Eliot being Swayze

Okay, I’m also incorporating @emotionalchastity‘s ask into this one, because she asked me my top 3 filmes.

So true story, questions like this make me forget if I’ve ever seen a single filme in my entire life, so I literally just googled “2018 movies” to jog my memory and retain a semblance of being human.

1. Annihilation - Good times were had by none. That fucking bear. The.bear.

2. Hereditary - Did movies even come out in 2018? I feel like 2017 was the cut off for good movie releases. Anyway. All hail King Paimon.

3. A Simple Favor - it’s the most recent one I watched and it was like a fun! quirky! Gone Girl and also Blake Lively in those suits.

4. Three Identical Strangers - I think documentary gets majorly overlooked usually, and this one is fucking intense.

5. The Party’s Just Beginning - Karen Gillan did a good job.

Anyway, 2018 has not been a year for realizing cinematic things, for me.

Top 3 snacks:

1. Smoked salmon

2. Sour cream and onion Pop Chips

3. Roasted garlic hummus

My top favorite interaction with you:

all of them

I was just gonna say (before I read your tags) that when I used to teach in karate I would always tell women to go for the eye sockets and never the crotch