miscreant perpetrator of low burlesque
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Dottie Gets Spanked 1993
the joke of an urtext, as much an adaptation of Freud's reckless scrutinizing as it is a plastic gag on it. the spank pervades Haynes' work: Veda and Mildred, Barbie hands on Barbie asses, Lenny in The Suicide ...what is that Jarvis Cocker "I'm Still Here" but a public self-spank, a meltdown of the pleasurable into identity-assertion as flagellation, as witness bore by faces that buried their amateur porno fantasies a long time ago? and then May December of course, development arrested, fantasy resurrected for TV-movie, "he wouldn't...he would!"
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Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story 1987
I thought a lot about Glen or Glenda, less in terms of horror-explorations of autonomy than in terms of the formal distance both stories take with their subjects. Haynes and Schneider seize on the postwar public service arrestment as a prism to scrutinize the spectator's relationship to Karen, to the story they think they know but fear they want to know more of. some of the chirpy artifice of those sensational news reelers can get sent up in order to…
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The Banshees of Inisherin 2022
I think by the fifth mention of the 'conflict on the mainland', we're really supposed to understand the central relationship's malfunction as figuratively indicative of the split between Free-State IRA fighters and the pro-treaty provisional government. such a metaphorical equivocation isn't exactly undue—the perpetuating doom loop that the end beach shot gestures towards is a reasonable reaction to the state of independence/ liberty in Ireland. but McDonagh's sense of political (let alone revolutionary) struggle is so fucked—The Lieutenant of Inishmore…
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X 2022
couldn't stop thinking of the Jackass sketch of Spike Jonze in the old lady drag and that pendulous prosthetic breast. that sketch was, if puerilely, actually actively confronting spectators' fears of older bodies in direct acknowledgement of them as bodies nonetheless (and therefore, equally deserving of our time and treatment and care and laughter.) we can't snicker without watching the civilians in frame recoil, either outright shirking from Jonze's visage or realizing in real-time they are not equipped to grapple…
