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20.000 especies de abejas (Estíbaliz Urresola Solaguren, 2023)

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20,000 Species of Bees

Written and directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren

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20000 Species of Bees (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, 2023).

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20.000 especies de abejas (Estíbaliz Urresola Solaguren, 2023)

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There are multiple posts saying that Legolas is the Texan amongst the Fellowship of the Ring and you’re all wrong it’s Gandalf. It’s 1000% Gandalf. Gandalf followed a wild horse for two days to tame it and would regularly ride up to the Shire with a cart full of homemade fireworks. Gandalf's the Texan.

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getting escorted out of a gun show for rating them based on mouth feel

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Diagram of how tumblr works and why blocking doesn't always work

(When I say "mostly inoffensive" I mean "just inoffensive enough to maintain plausible deniability")

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All hail the almond ig

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My friend scared me while I was taking pictures of a sturgeon

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"The film wants you to be uncomfortable" "it's explicit and want to confront prudishness" but it's okay to feel prudish? It's okay to feel uncomfortable about sex and express discomfort about the way it was handled in a movie ABOUT sexuality in a woman? And it has nothing to do with media literacy or whatever bc you can still feel uneasiness by the explicitness while also knowing it's a satirical movie

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The Foam Sprite, Herbert James Draper (1897)

Poor thing, Yorgos Lanthimos (2023)

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Like it's very pretty and fantastical and also very mid.

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Why do I love this movie and hate it at the same time. There's like an big fkn gap between people who hate Poor Things and love it and tbh both sides are reasonable.

I do personally think that this isn't a feminist story and more a coming-of-age story

How many times have we seen male media creators take female characters (or characters in general) and have them use sex/prostitution as a means for freedom? Once you know that the original creator was a man and the director was a man you kinda see the cliches and its not unreasonable or prudish to question the intention behind Bella. The discourse for this film would have been very little if it came from a woman bc then there would be no male gaze to acknowledge, regardless of whether it exists or not.

Is the movie about Bella's autonomy and liberation? Yes. Could there have been other ways to show that besides the sex? Also yes. The film barely covers that, and that's where I kinda felt like the movie was shallow and flat plot-wise. We know she's grown bc she can walk properly now and speak in full sentences but has she changed? I frankly didnt even find her motives to 'change the world' and empathy very convincing.

I think the majority of the reason why people love it so much was bc its very very visionary and the technical parts heighten the absurdist aesthetic visual to a point where it's just very pleasing to look at.

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I read your review of Poor Things and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the section in Alexandria? It was horrifically executed on many levels but narratively, that part of the film is about Bella learning about class structure. She rebels against the cruelty of society through charity then by working as a prostitute, during which time she has cruelty inflicted upon her instead. Finally, she realizes that God’s creation of her was ultimately cruel, and then she runs away with her ex-husband-father only to realize that her prior self-mother was fundamentally characterized by cruelty, especially to her “lessers.” She then decides once again that she does not want to be cruel, but then she achieves this by taking God’s place as the doctor-patriarch and ruling his household with a new pet goat. The entire film is also about Bella learning about feminism: the arbitrary oppression of women is not only nonsensical, it’s bad! But then the ending has her reproduce almost all those power structures and cruelty she claims to reject, and has the unfortunate consequence of positioning her as ultimately equally cruel/callous as God, the guy she meets on the boat who shows her all the starving people, and her former self-mother, etc. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on why this is or like, what the director’s message was beyond self-contradiction and taking cheap shots at starving people?

so i would quibble a bit with the idea that bella's experience in the maison-close is exclusively or even primarily portraying sex-for-pay as a site of cruelty. i think it's more depicting paid sex as work, and work as unpleasant and repressive, and that's why the maison is the site where bella gets involved in socialist politics—if moral philosophy is the arena by which she responds to the injustice of the poverty in alexandria, then labour politics plays the analogous role where the maison is concerned. her problems there aren't inherently with the idea of being paid for sex, but with specific elements of the work arrangement (eg, she suggests that the women should choose their clients, rather than vice versa). ofc she has some customers who are cruel or thoughtless or rude, but i didn't read the film as suggesting that was universal to sex work, and the effect of the position is more to demystify sex, for bella, than to convert it into being purely a site of trauma or misery. now i don't think this film offers a particularly blistering or deep analysis of sex work or socialism or wage labour, dgmw, but i do think the function of the maison is different narratively to that of the alexandria section.

anyway to answer your actual question: yeah so this is really my central gripe with the film. lanthimos (slash his screenwriter tony mcnamara) spends much of the film gesturing toward bella's growing awareness of several hierarchical structures that other characters take for granted: the uneven nature of the parent/child relationship (god took her body and created her without asking); class stratification (alexandria); the 'civilisation' of individuals and societies via education and bio-alteration (bella's talk about 'improving' herself; her 'progression' from essentially a pleasure-seeking child to an educated and 'articulate' adult). these three dimensions often overlap (eg, the conflation of 'childishness' with lack of education with inability to behave in 'high society'), though, most overtly, it's in that third one that we can see how these notions of improvement and biological melioration speak to discourses about the 'progress' and 'regress' of whole societies and peoples, and voluntarist ideas about how human alteration of biology (namely, our own) might produce people, and therefore societies, that are better or worse on some metric: beauty, fitness, intelligence, morality, longevity, &c. this is why i keep saying that like.... this film is about eugenics djkdjsk.

the issue with the alexandria section to me is, first, it's like 2 minutes (processed in the hollywood yellow filter) where the abject poverty of other people is a life lesson for bella. we're not asking any questions like, how is that poverty produced, and might it have anything to do with the ship bella is on or the fantastical lisbon she left or the comparative wealth of paris and london...? secondly, everything that the film thinks it's doing for the entire runtime by having bella grapple with learning about cruelty, and misery, and the kinds of received social truths that lanthimos is able to problematise through her eyes because she's literally tabula rasa—all of that is just so negated by having an ending in which she bio-engineers her shitty ex-husband, played as a triumphant moment. i don't even inherently have an issue with the actual plot point; certainly she has motive, and narratively it could have worked if it were framed as what it is: bella ascending to the powerful position in the oppressive system that created her, and using her status to enact cruelty against someone who 'deserves' it—ie, leveraging her class and race within the existing social forms rather than continuing to question or challenge them. if that ending were played as a tragedy, or a bleak satire, it would at least be making A Point. but it's not even, because it's just framed as deserved comeuppance for this guy we were introduced to in the 11th hour as a scumbag, so it's psychologically beneficial for bella actually to do the sci-fi surgery to him that literally reduces him to what's framed as a lower life form. unserious

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Sorry but Bella Baxter should’ve had hairy pits

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Poor Things (2023)