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@gehayi said: can you please tell us more about Israel Rank?

POV: We are at a slumber party and I am kicking my feet and giggling and telling you about the boy I like.

"Oh my god, his name is Israel Rank, and he's from a book called Israel Rank: Autobiography of a Criminal, and he is so hot! The musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, and the movie Kind Hearts and Coronets were both based on the book, but they made him other things besides Jewish, which is so bogus. Roger Ebert said it made the story more 'universal', which I guess means half-Italian is more universal than half-Jewish, which, what the fuck?

Anyway, he's the worst person in the world and I love him. He's like Heathcliff plus Steerpike plus Edmund the Bastard. He's the really distant relative of and earl, and his mother was disinherited for marrying a Jewish man. Israel isn't technically Jewish, he was baptized and raised Anglican, but he looks Jewish- and also really hot, and he says that combination upsets people! Kind of an Adrian Brody thing? I would have cast Ezra Miller before they turned out to be a shitshow of a person. And his name is Israel, kind of as a fuck you to mom's family. So he decides if people are going to give him shit about it anyway, he's going to embrace it.

He's in love with this girl Sibella, who won't marry him because he's both half-Jewish and poor, so starting as a hypothetical lark he wonders if he could just murder every single family member between him and an earldom. And then he does it! After sexual fantasies about Lucrezia Borgia encouraging him to! What an absolute freak.

So he starts killing, and his narration is so dry and funny about it. He tells the reader that in his experience, Jews aren't all that violent- he speculates that Shylock would have walked back the pound of flesh if he'd had time to calm down- but he has the blood of evil rapacious noblemen on his non-Jewish side which are to blame. He kills most of his family, except for the cousin-in-law whom he marries. He also still love Sibella. And his wife! He just can't stop fucking, he's so awful! (And I think he's bisexual. At least, I don't know how else I'm supposed to interpret the part where he's in school and "the boy I loved chose me as his Jonathan.")

And he gets away with it! He's super popular at his trial because he's so handsome and charming and the same society that scorned him, now that he's an earl, gossips that his Jewish ancestry must be very slight and distant. And there's a twist that gets him off the hook which is actually a real bummer of a plot point, even he's bummed out by it, but it's such a perfect capper to a life of cruelty.

Honestly, I do get why none of the adaptations keep the half-Jewish thing, they're probably afraid it would seem antisemitic, but in my opinion it's a real shame because it's so central to his character and I think I do want a sexy Jewish Byronic antihero. He's the worst. I love him. I would marry him. I would immediately divorce him. His favorite book is Emma!"

For a more academic discussion, I did a podcast episode on him way back when!

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Thoughts on the second half:

I love Taffy! The dad can go to hell, though.

Move over, Veronica and JD, there is something seriously wrong with these two and I quite enjoy them! May they never involve anyone else in their love life!

I'm kind of surprised that we never found out more about the ax murderer. The villain of a different movie, I guess.

Also kind of surprised they never just had her give him a pen and paper and have him write his thoughts? I guess they were going for the Boris Karloff/Christopher Lee speechless thing (until the end.)

I like that she's into silent movies, that's much less on the nose than having her be into Universal or Hammer Horror, though it would have been amusing to reference the somnambulist in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

I am going to put together a closet cosplay of that all black outfit as soon as I possibly can!

Thoughts midway through Lisa Frankenstein:

This movie would have defined me if I could have seen it in high school. Nerd girl obsessed with old movies too shy to be one of the goths, with a crush on a poetic guy too cool for her, but she'll meet the right undead boy someday? I would have built my new self image around it.

It's very clearly trying to be early (good) era Tim Burton with the grotesque suburban aesthetic, harkening back to the eighties the way he did to the fifties

There's some thesis in here about how the female outsider in these movies always has to be conventionally attractive and the kind of person who could be accepted under the right circumstances, but that's a lot of weight to hang on one movie

I described the plot to my husband as "She's trying to collect body parts to help build her undead boyfriend a body." "Like Hellraiser?" he asked, and huh. Yeah. A lot like Hellraiser.

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Thoughts midway through Lisa Frankenstein:

This movie would have defined me if I could have seen it in high school. Nerd girl obsessed with old movies too shy to be one of the goths, with a crush on a poetic guy too cool for her, but she'll meet the right undead boy someday? I would have built my new self image around it.

It's very clearly trying to be early (good) era Tim Burton with the grotesque suburban aesthetic, harkening back to the eighties the way he did to the fifties

There's some thesis in here about how the female outsider in these movies always has to be conventionally attractive and the kind of person who could be accepted under the right circumstances, but that's a lot of weight to hang on one movie

I described the plot to my husband as "She's trying to collect body parts to help build her undead boyfriend a body." "Like Hellraiser?" he asked, and huh. Yeah. A lot like Hellraiser.

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Photoplay, December 1934

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Made a drawing based on retro scifi stuff. Also added a few things from games I played. Title: Future as imagined in the past

It includes an iterator can from Rainworld, and an automaton from Frostpunk.

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The Lost Boys (1987)

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Fanvids I'm contemplating attempting:

Twin Peaks set to In My Home Town by Tom Lehrer

All the various Scarecrows set to Lovecraft in Brooklyn by The Mountain Goats

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Black Satin Brocade Bodice with Yellow Flowers and Green Velvet Bows

c.1890

made by American designer Miss Foley

brocaded silk satin, cotton net, and beads

Phoenix Art Museum

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Damn it, I waited too long to write my Batman/Roadhouse fusion fic and now there's a remake, if I write it I'll look like a bandwagon jumper!

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This only gets funnier as he keeps doing it. I cheer every time Captain Marvel chucks a henchman off a building, and chuckle at each joke Rifftrax makes about his bloodthirst, and how they no longer trust him to rescue anyone without throwing them just out of habit.

For all the debate around whether or not Batman should kill, it was eye opening to see the 1940s Captain Marvel serial shorts where he just kills without hesitation. In one episode, he just picks a guy up- a henchman, not even a main villain!- and chucks him off a rooftop. In another, he shoots a machine gun at a bunch of guys. (As Rifftrax put it, "Guns don't kill people, Captain Marvel kills people!") All this from the alter ego of Billy Batson, whose age is ambiguous in the serials but is usually depicted as secretly a little kid. Yeah, okay, superheroes should probably not do that.

[forthegothicheroine]

which streaming service has the most vintage movies? If you don't know, maybe your followers could answer? 🙏

Ooh hoo hoo you asked and I'll answer!!

I actually made a post like this for the hot men tournament, but I can't find it now so I'll do it again from scratch. The short answer is that I don't know of any one streaming service that has all the old vintage movies—but most streaming services have a "classics" genre category that can get you started. Here's a small selection of what you can find on different streaming services:

TUBI (free):

The Adventures of Robin Hood (Olivia de Havilland)

A Streetcar Named Desire (Vivien Leigh)

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Jane Powell, Julie Newmar)

North by Northwest (Eva Marie Saint)

The Music Man (Shirley Jones)

The Women (Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, several other hotties in small parts)

The Philadelphia Story (Katharine Hepburn, Ruth Hussey)

Notorious (Ingrid Bergman)

Bell, Book, and Candle (Kim Novak, Elsa Lanchester)

The Talk of the Town (Jean Arthur)

Dark Victory (Bette Davis)

KANOPY (free through some libraries):

Dial M for Murder (Grace Kelly)

His Girl Friday (Rosalind Russell)

Ball of Fire (Barbara Stanwyck)

Black Orpheus (Marpessa Dawn)

Flower Drum Song (Reiko Sato, Nancy Kwan, Miyoshi Umeki)

Marriage Italian Style (Sophia Loren)

The Rose Tattoo (Anna Magnani)

Tokyo Story (Setsuko Hara)

War and Peace (Audrey Hepburn, Anita Ekberg)

Salt of the Earth (Rosaura Revueltas)

Metropolis (Brigitte Helm)

The Red Shoes (Moira Shearer)

HOOPLA (free through some libraries):

The Court Jester (Angela Lansbury, Glynis Johns)

Sunset Boulevard (Gloria Swanson)

A Place in the Sun (Elizabeth Taylor)

Barefoot in the Park (Jane Fonda)

The Barefoot Contessa (Ava Gardner)

Wings (Clara Bow)

YOUTUBE (has a lot of older movies that have slipped through copyright/are still up for some reason):

Charade (Audrey Hepburn)

Story Weather (Lena Horne)

Gilda (Rita Hayworth)

Rebecca (Joan Fontaine)

This entire playlist of Indian cinema that I just found (Madhubala, Waheeda Rehman, Nargis, Meena Kumari, etc.)

And that's just a small sample. There is also always your local library for physical DVDs, the Internet Archive, and....other methods.....if you know exactly what you're looking for.

I haven't seen all of these movies, so don't consider them personal recommendations—these are just famous movies with our hotties in them, so please be careful if you have trigger warnings. Good luck and have fun!

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well i didn’t want to ASSUME the guy who has fangs and weird eyes and is constantly making strange cryptic comments about blood is a vampire. That would’ve been rude.

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some original art inspired by the flammarion engraving☀️

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Camelot, 1967.

Renato Casaro artwork.

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Marlene Dietrich “Dali” personally owned makeup compact “Bird in Hand” by Elgin American.

Brass compact features textured wings with gold painted tips and red enamel eyes. It opens to a mirror and unused pouf made of soft real feathers, with additional hinged compartment for pressed powder. A lipstick tube emerges from behind the bird’s head and the tail opens as a pillbox compartment. The name “Dali” is engraved and painted in black under the bird’s neck on the base of the lipstick tube, but no documentation exists to suggest Salvador Dali designed the bird, rather Ellison Irelan, Carl Fritz and Mortimer Vogelman are credited with the design. Compact dates to 1951.

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@pscentral​ event 26: minimalism ↳ old hollywood film bloopers [x] + bonus: