Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the film category.
True Blood on TV
It’s my personal version of watching football, I guess, in the sense of being utterly useless and silly and bewitchingly fun vicarious involvement in events so far from our own real lives. In the same way as the football fans discuss the games—what coaches might do, relative skills of players—we discussed throughout the first season whether Sam could have killed vampire-friendly female Bon Temps citizens to frighten Sookie away from Bill, whether the Sheriff’s Department could have been covering up for one of their own, what Amy was REALLY after. But the brilliant twist of the whole series, books and HBO, is that in making the vampires the latest civil rights-vs.-bigotry flashpoint, they force the viewer to exist in a world where race and sexuality aren’t all that important. This can be very disturbing, e.g. when Sookie’s friend and coworker Lafayette, both gay and African American, confronts a high-profile politician with whom he’s had various extra-legal business dealings—because he’s outraged by the would-be senator’s anti-vampire stance, not his homophobia—and then proceeds to use the politician’s constituents’ racism to harm his electability by posing for a friendly photo. The choice of music and the swampy southern atmosphere of the show are also rather enchanting.
This Filthy World! and something really disgusting…
Watching the last bits of John Waters’ wonderful monologue entitled John Waters: This Filthy World made me soooo happy…I hope he gets to make the film MangerMania! He seems like a happy person…said he loves the description the Japan Times gave Pecker, his delightful flick about the art world, pubic hair, shoplifting, young love, and a talking Virgin Mary: “a Disney film for perverts.” Seriously…i didn’t think it was like that at all, but loved the film, and its efforts to encourage young people to vote, LOL… was hoping he’d mention the enthralling Harry Dodge / Harriet Dodge, who played a lovely filmic revolutionary in Cecil B. Demented as well as one of my favoritest characters in ALL OF CINEMA: Valentine in By Hook or By Crook–but perhaps he’d done so earlier. Still, was glad I learned he has a TV show on HERE!, John Waters Presents Movies that Will Corrupt You. One thing that he mentioned, however, caused me to look up something reeeeeally disgusting online. When Mr. Waters mentioned “reborn babies” I went right to Google, having seen one of the hideous products of these sick “artists” at my day job. I even gave my colleagues’ little monster, Baby Josh, a tattoo, and used some of my nicest white shimmery eye shadow to make it look like he’d been snorting something white and a little sparklescent. Sure enough, these things are truly scary. Imagine how scary the people who make them must be. And, at least at a site called Destiny Dolls or something equally putrescing, they can’t spell. On a website selling their frightening spawn, they can’t even bother to spell correctly.
A friend of sorts at work told me today of someone who, he felt, “wouldn’t like [my] comics at all.” Now, I have a lot of problems with much of the work I put out there in the past and would someday like to put out more and better and truer and realer comics. But just hatin’ on ’em?! That would be the type of person, I suggested, who would like to drown kittens. My friend irritated me by disagreeing bluntly that someone “with a different worldview from my own” would hate my work. Let’s see, even if my art were brutally reduced in the most insulting and trivializing manner possible to simply propaganda for some “worldview,” that worldview would propose that women are people…that a generation of gay men decimated by AIDS was a bad thing…that knowledge and investigation and education and joy go better with sex than shame and rejection and closed minds…that children are to be loved, encouraged, taught, and listened to with respect… My friend wouldn’t tell me what a different worldview from that could look like, other than a misogynistic, homophobic, sexually puritanical, pro-child-abuse kitten-drowner. This hurt my feelings surprisingly and so I went to look at some dinosaur statues nearby at the Academy of Natural History at lunch. They looked so birdlike, I found it heartening: a reminder that theories come and theories go.
But a sense of humor, including the ability to at least peek over the walls of one’s ego, can help in any era a time traveler might visit.
Angela Bocage 