Glo Up

“i thought i’d weird you out” you weirded me in, twin

I think strange horrible things should stop befalling my friends

I think strange wonderful things should start befalling my friends

Until death, all defeat is psychological.

surprisingly forward-thinking of jim henson and co. to make a female character in the 70's that's allowed to be loud-mouthed and violent and kind of overwhelmingly romantic and even a huge bitch at times and not have a moment where any character asks her to change

going through all the muppet movies in a row made me realize that like. miss piggy was made in the 70's. and it's so rare even today to have a character like her. she's loud, she's selfish, she's funny, she's extremely vain, she's obsessed with romance, she's violent, she's kind of annoying, and there's not a single moment in any of these films where she's asked to tone down any of these personality traits. i am not joking when i say that miss piggy might be one of the best treated female characters ever written

holy shit

prev I think his problem is that he's a lazy entitled hack, honestly? Remember those parody horror adaptations from a few years ago, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I think Flanagan is just as lazy but less self-aware. He doesn't really see the problem with taking a Shirley Jackson or Stephen King original concept, tacking his own crappy half-formed idea onto it, and repackaging it as a creative adaptation. Flanagan isn't really adapting these original works. Adaptations are supposed to use the original material as a springboard into some new creative work. For example, in A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley adapted the story of King Lear into a new story about a misogynist landowner and the cruelty he inflicts on all three of his daughters. Smiley's adaptation took the source material into account. She used Lear's pride, his patriarchal entitlement, his alternately callous and grasping behavior towards his daughters, and the sorrow and bitterness that drove them into conflict with each other. She maintained much of the character and plot detail, and where she kept it she made sure to account for its effect on the story. Smiley also built something new. Her adaptation focuses on the perspectives of Regan and Goneril, who in her version are heroic survivors. She also highlights the consequences of Lear's selfishness for the land itself. This theme was certainly present in King Lear, but she brings it to the foreground, and transforms it from a war of succession into generational environmental depredation. She also opted to change emotional incest into actual explicit incest, because she was interested in exploring patriarchal abuse of women. Similarly, it would be interesting to see a version of Carrie whose mother is a tradwife influencer attached to a megachurch. Imagine the shower scene as a viral video staged by her mother! Who knows if that would be good, but it would be a creative exploration of the themes from the original: misogyny, shame, exposure, bullying. It would also involve using details from the original - the mother's inability to see her daughter as a person - to explore these themes in a new way. If you "adapt" original work without acknowledging the source material or connecting it to a fully-realized new idea, you're just appropriating. You're using the reputation and quality of a more famous original work to add luster to your own thin premise. It's clear that Flanagan doesn't respect the source material. He turned his Shirley Jackson "adaptation" into a paean to the transcendent love of the nuclear family. He doesn't care about what these original works are trying to say. He just likes the vibes. Spooky British Manor! Spooky Vampire Island! Spooky Telekinetic Girl! It's hard to ignore the source material and use it effectively to build something new (imagine a version of King Lear where he's presented as a good dad), but it doesn't seem like Flanagan is even trying to present a novel idea. His works are atmospheric and competent, but they're just a hash of horror tropes. His Netflix series were more like a collection of vignettes than a cohesive story. This idea is an interesting one, but it's not Carrie, and it doesn't sound like he really plans to think through the horror implications of "a mother who tries to create a private utopia for a sensitive girl who turns out to have telekinetic powers." I think Flanagan doesn't see the difference because nobody ever told him that being a horror auteur is about more than gorging on the classics and then huffing your own farts.

Last time this came around I showed my three year old and he said "He's little like me!" and stared for a whole minute (v. Long in toddler time).

on another note, watched The Mummy (1999) the other day and I couldn’t help  feel like the O’Connells and the Addams (Addams Family Values (1993) would get on really well ya know? The O’Connells are basically the pastel adventure version of the Addams, surely they would just be vibin’ over tea and crumpets in an extremely haunted mansion having a ball of a time

Jonathan and Fester and Cousin Itt watch from the bar, where Lurch and Thing are making the drinks.