Movies
- Revisiting The Flight of Dragons, a Forgotten Gem of ’80s Fantasy (Tor.com)
- How Harrow the Ninth Uses the Language of Fanfiction to Process Grief (Tor.com)
- “What did I know of mortal babies?”: Six Parenthood Lessons From CIRCE (Book Riot)
- Out of the Closet and Out of Time: On Being an Old(ish) Mother (Literary Hub)
I haven’t seen ENCANTO but I gather Luisa is the middle sister and yet her song is the anthem of eldest daughters the world over. 🍿🎵
Watched A California Christmas & A California Christmas: City Lights. They’re… Fine. There’s the use of a trope in the City Lights epilogue that actually makes me a bit sad. Happy to chat in replies if anyone is interested. ❤️💻🍿🎄
I just watched Single All the Way while making part of W’s Christmas present. It is the anti-Happiest Season and I love it extra for that. More stories about out queer people being in love and their families being excited for them, please. 🍿💻❤️🎄🏳️🌈
🔖📚 🍿 Some good things I’ve read so far today:
📽️ Watched In a Lonely Place.
I watched this because it’s on the movie list on the aesthetics wiki page for dark academia. I’m not sure what qualifies it as dark academia; is it its noirness? The suspense? The sad inevitability of its conclusion? It doesn’t have a connection to learning or school.
Regardless, I enjoyed it and recommend it.
One of the elements of the film is that temperamental screenwriter Dixon Steele (one of the inspirations for Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Dixon Hill writes feverishly, composing by hand and then giving pages to his neighbor/girlfriend, Laurel Gray, to type up. He also gives her elaborate breakfast orders and makes other demands of her that are things people normally get compensated for doing. This reminded me of stories of J. D. Salinger and other writers relying on the women in their lives to take care of everything except the writing. It didn’t sit well with me in this movie and I think Steele’s behavior is supposed to serve as evidence that he is Not A Great Guy. It’s a little hard to be sure, as the film was released in 1950, but within the film a massage therapist tells Gray that she should be getting paid for typing and to look after her own career.
Steele being a dude who can alternate between charming and scary reminded me of Jenny Offill’s term, “art monster,” a concept I first encountered in Austin Kleon’s writing. He can be terrifyingly violent. At one point in the film, Steele’s friend’s wife says to Gray something like “He’s an artist; he can get away with being temperamental.” I read this not as an excuse being made by the film, but rather as another moment that is designed to make the audience worry for Gray’s wellbeing.
All told, a great movie, well executed.
🔖📺🍿This piece identifies what made LOKI less than ideal for me: Loki himself is constrained, not as grand or mischievous as we’re used to. Great piece overall:
Loki as Other: Why Do Queer and Female Viewers Love the Trickster? tor.comRead: www.tor.com
🔖🍿📚 It’s nice timing to read this after recently starting my Dorian Gray re-read:
Manic Pixie Dream Portrait: On 500 Days of Summer and Dorian Gray. ‹ Literary Hub lithub.comRead: lithub.com
Hulu has both Beetlejuice and Season 7 of Younger, see y’all next week. 📺🍿
🍿📺🗯️ I just watched the two pre-Loki episodes of Marvel Studios LEGENDS and y’all the MCU gets more obtuse all the time. In comics they do periodic resets that make it easy for new people to jump in. The MCU is labyrinthine enough that I think it’s time it had one.
🔖🍿📺 Read
Marvel movies have a weird relationship with kissing and romance - Polygon polygon.com(via baldur on micro.blog)Read: www.polygon.com
My favorite thing about Labyrinth is that the ending suggests that you can grow up while retaining your attachment to fantasy. 🍿
Which Muppet do I most identify with? Well… 
📺🍿
Reddit user JaytheChou is photoshopping Paddington into a different movie every day and it is a source of joy. 🍿🔖
I’ve always been resentful of the trope where girls have to pretend to be boys to get stuff done, but Natalie Zutter’s piece about Leia disguising herself as Boushh especially the part about Padme subverting it, is a welcome fresh perspective. 🍿🔖
🔖 I somehow missed Linda Holmes’s beautiful piece about The Muppet Movie soundtrack. She pulls out the very lines that always makes me cry. 🌈🐸🎵
Watching My Neighbor Totoro & my kid is saying that I’m like Mama Kusakabe because we both have dark hair and fair skin. I said, “And I, too, am voiced by Lea Salonga,” and he said, “No, you’re not, you’re voiced by your voice box.” 🍿
We are now at the “Watch Studio Ghibli instead of PBS Kids” stage of the pandemic. 🍿
What I’m learning from the MCU (caught up on WandaVision & currently watching Agents of SHIELD 3x15) is that everyone with a PhD in the natural sciences is good at hacking and creating algorithms. Scientists, is this true? 📺🍿
🔖🍿 The Wonder Woman Movies Have a Women Problem A great analysis with ideas for how Wonder Woman movies could better reflect all the best stuff about other Wonder Woman media.
🍿 Watched Wonder Woman 1984. Was it flawless? No. Did the fact that it was a Wonder Woman movie and had a cute kid in it gain it enormous good will from me? Absolutely.
One song into Jingle Jangle and I’m aching for more R&B musicals - originals, not juke box shows. 🍿
I really enjoyed reading this piece about Star Wars stormtrooper strategy & tactics, which is super unlike me. 📺🍿
🔖In ‘The Mandalorian,’ Stormtroopers Have Finally Discovered Tactics wired.com
📽️ I just finished watching REBECCA on Netflix and it’s… fine. But it’s not gothic. Glen Weldon’s review sums it up pretty well.
In which I have a mid-life crisis and freak out about schooling as a societal... thing. Woo Dead Poets Society! 📽️
I’ve been pulled deep into Dark Academia’s orbit, because it is the aesthetic I’ve been unknowingly building my whole life, and because of this I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in a very long time last night.
Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I haven’t watched in a long time and realize that it is one of the threads woven into the fabric of my very being. It’s true of LABYRINTH. It’s true of Tim Burton’s BATMAN. And it’s true of DEAD POETS SOCIETY.
I don’t know when I first saw this movie, only that in the ten years between its release and my high school graduation, it came to hold a special place in my heart. It was a constant cultural presence.
On the day our textbooks were issued in AP English, our teacher pointed out that there was an essay introduction not unlike that written by the apocryphal J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. He said that we would not be ripping it out of the book, but that we should ignore it.
To keep from having the dull inflected practice of the Latin teacher’s declension lesson in the movie, my Latin teacher had us stand on the desks as we shouted verb endings. When I became a Latin teacher, I did the same thing. In my first year of teaching, my students O Captain My Captained me after I assigned DPS for them to watch on a day that I was out sick. I thought, “Well, I have achieved a teacher’s dream in my first year, guess it’s time to retire.”
When I started this viewing, I thought, “Surely it won’t be as amazing as years of distance have made it seem,” but it is. (Is it without flaw? Of course not. And yet, still stunning.)
No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
Mr. Keating said this and I held my breath. Here he had articulated something that lives at the very core of who I am.
I don’t want to spoil too much, though I feel like a 31 year old movie should be past the statute of limitations, but I’ll say this: a student dies in the film. And when the prep school administrator is speaking to the other students about this death in an assembly, here is what he says:
“He was a fine student. One of our best. He will be greatly missed.”
I got a little ragey. A fine student? I got a little horrified, as that’s kind of been my identity for much of my life. I got a little…
WHAT IS IT ALL FOR?
Why are people fine students, and why is THAT the thing you would remark on? This same character was kind, joyful, welcoming, compassionate. Isn’t that more important than being a fine student?
Looking at it from a realistic perspective, the administrator probably didn’t know the student well enough to know anything about him except that he was a fine student.
But in the moment, that’s not what mattered to me. I looked at myself and I asked myself, “Why? What was I a fine student for?” This character, I think he was a fine student out of duty, a sense of obligation to his family. When I talked to W. about it, he pointed out that I enjoy learning more broadly, and that there is value in learning. But I tossed back, “But you can learn a lot without being a fine student.”
I guess this is what it took for me to crack after devoting almost my entirely life to education in one way or another, especially my professional life. Here I am approaching the end of a PhD, and asking myself WHY DO WE EVEN SCHOOL?
There are reasons, and I’ve also been reading about unschooling, and I’m not going to break with school.
I just want to be sure it’s not the only remarkable thing in my or my family’s life.
📽️ Just finished watching DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in years and now I’m having an existential crisis because I don’t want my eulogy or epitaph to be “She was a fine student.” How’s your Sunday going?