Leah Libresco Sargeant on Barbie:
“The message resonated with Hari Nef, a transgender actress who plays Doctor Barbie. In an Instagram post promoting the film, Nef said that the experience of being a woman badly is the most universal experience of womanhood. Nef and a group of transgender friends call themselves “the dolls” because, as Nef explained, “underneath the word ‘doll’ is the shape of a woman who is not quite a woman—recognizable as such, but still a fake.”
I had to read this paragraph three times, incredulously. I will just say…I do not experience being a woman badly.
Emily Kubincanek at FSR:
Curated themes and highlights on specific movie stars are a great jumping off point that never claim to be exhaustive. It’s not something an algorithm can achieve. That’s why losing Tabesh was a code-red alarm for anyone who cares about TCM. Curation takes a wealth of knowledge of movies, but not just knowing a bunch of titles that have been said to be similar, but the movies that haven’t been associated together before. Real programming makes you see movies you’ve seen already differently when curated with other movies and TCM has done that time and again.
For the record (and Emily states this in the piece), Charlie Tabesh has been rehired as chief programmer at TCM, but the fact that he was ever let go in the first place speaks volumes about how much Warner under David Zaslav cares about TCM, which is the single most valuable entity to classic film fans over the past several decades. I’m not unworried.📽
Watching: Girl Crazy (1943) 📽
Our initial choice tonight was Oklahoma, but APPARENTLY my DVD of it is non-anamorphic, so that was a no-go. Girl Crazy already had the happy side effect of my 5yo deciding to give us a tap-dancing show!
Watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 📽
I don’t think I’ve seen this since it was in theatres. I had forgotten David Tennant was in it! Having just read the book with my 10yo it was really clear how much they cut and how basically jumbled and abrupt and unclear the film is as a result. I’m okay cutting the house elf stuff, but Rita Skeeter was very underused, and Hermione basically had nothing to do but hang on Viktor Krum’s arm. (To be fair that’s almost true in the book, too.) My daughter just kept muttering “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be”. Everyone’s a critic. I will say I liked how the film highlighted Neville’s sweetness in the Yule Ball section. He’s so adorable.📽
My husband is bingeing Supernatural and whenever I’m in the same room sort of watching, I’m basically incredulously questioning everything in the show’s lore. Like. There’s this bureaucracy of angels trying to protect heaven, and I’m like, but God is in heaven so he can kind of protect it, and he’s like, no God left heaven, and I’m like WHAT. And then apparently they kicked Lucifer out of hell, so there’s this lesser demon named Crowley (I can only think of Aleister Crowley) in a gangster suit who’s running it. Purgatory is filled with these man-eating vampires. It’s like someone read all the words in Catholic metaphysics but didn’t bother to find out what any of them meant.
Watched half of Bram Stoker’s Dracula this morning. In some ways this is the best version, but in the ways it’s not, it’s really really not. Coppola gets the atmosphere, tone, and visuals very right. Dracula in his castle, smashing Jonathan’s shaving mirror, crawling down the walls like a lizard, so great. It also keeps all the relationships and major events of the book (so far) intact, which neither 1931 nor 1958 do. But while no one would deny that there’s a sexual aspect to Dracula, this one takes it to extremes, from the fanfic of Dracula’s romantic backstory to going far beyond the book in Jonathan’s encounter with the three succubi and Lucy’s first encounter with Dracula (who here is some kind of bloodsucking werewolf?!). Even Mina starts to be drawn to Dracula, in guise as a Prince, before hearing that Jonathan is alive. This runs so entirely counter to Mina’s purpose in the book. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a ‘90s Hollywood movie wouldn’t understand or value virtue. I will say I do really like the addition of seeing Vlad Dracul explicitly renounce God, which does support the themes of Dracula as an inversion of Christianity. Also the idea that Renfield had been an earlier envoy to Dracula and went mad as a result works quite well (this is in the 1931 version as well in a slightly different form).
The plot description of Horror of Dracula (1958) says it “adheres closer to the original tale than its successors” but I’m halfway through and it’s almost nothing like the book? Jonathan is turned, he’s engaged to Lucy, who is Arthur’s sister, and Arthur is married to Mina. Uh…
I would say this guy is largely right in his description of Lawrence of Arabia, but that these elements are features, not bugs. www.reddit.com
Okay, there’s a 1958 film version of The Brothers Karamazov with William Shatner as Alyosha. I’m sorry, what?! 🙃
