#charles is lowercase because I do not respect him

[pinkpeony1]

an overly long analysis of Matthew and Alastair part 2 - this time making even less sense (i think)

tldr: their relationship is a cycle of pain and hurt, Matthew can’t heal without reconciling with Alastair, while Alastair has already done so. also i am scared for their ending and want them to both be happy but idk if they both can 😭

thinking once again about how Matthew and Alastair’s dynamic. i love Alastair, he is such a complex character who has changed the most during the time we first meet him till now than I think any other tsc character, and when I first read tftsa I did not like him (i’m sorry, i’m now a Stan) on the other hand, i love Matthew so much, and I can’t help but feel sorry for him over what happened with Charlotte and his sister, but also i hate him for what he did to Alastair and also turning the merry thieves+co against him/making them dislike him and leading to Alastair being miserable and also costing him potential friendships with people that would understand him.

because like James and Alastair I think would be good friends under different circumstances, if they actually interacted for the first time post shadowhunter academy. they are both the protective order brother who is a sweetheart that wants the best for their family but is terrible at opening up, care for Cordelia and Thomas—in different ways lol—and is also quite dramatic and also a lit nerd. and Christopher and Alastair is dynamic that hasn’t been explored but I feel they would have a fun grumpy/sunshine friendship going on.

but Matthew’s trauma led him to hating Alastair and blaming him for everything wrong in his life even if it wasn’t his fault or was the result of his own actions, which in turn made Alastair’s life even worse. taking out his anger towards himself and his situation on Alastair instead of using a healthy coping mechanism. and then the fact that Matthew if he doesn’t get the help he needs could so easily turn into Alastair’s father (Silas right? idk). the way that their stories are so similar in that how they deal with tragedy led them to where they are. how their actions as children have caused them to be so guilt-riddled, working through it by bottling it up (and then lashing out in Matthew’s case) but never wanting to burden them, when the original incident at the academy was really neither of their faults, more so the environment they were in that led them to it.

I really don’t know how Cassie has planned on resolving their arcs, in the past, a bad relationship in the beginning led to a really fun and caring friendship (like Gabriel and Will and also Clary and Alec), but there is also like no way for Matthew in particular to get to the place where he can work through what he did and apologize for his actions. Alastair is already there—he knows the reasoning for his actions, he is working through his trauma, he’s forming healthy non-familial relationships for the first time.

but even with all of the pain and hurt between them i still almost want them to be friends? like Matthew has deeply hurt Alastair, but tsc, for me, has in part always been about owning up to your mistakes, doing what you can to reconcile with your past and the people who you hurt.

with Cassie making the ending less tragic i have no idea what to expect from their dynamic and their arcs, i can really only hope they find happiness peace within themselves and (at least in Matthew’s case because Alastair didn’t know what he unwittingly did to Matthew) apologize. like literally thinking about Matthew’s ending stresses me tf out😭. like I want the best for both of them, but I can’t help but fear a happy ending for one means the other won’t get theirs.

also like I said last time because it is the one thing we know they agree on and i think it’s fun to say (i’m overly excited for the scene in which they both yell at him): fuck charles

[watching-pictures-move]

Put On Your Raincoats #23 | Jungle Blue (Tobalina, 1978)

These days, as I spend much of my time trawling through Letterboxd, one of the things that will get me interested in a movie is an eye-catching poster. Plenty of ill-advised viewing decisions have been made by yours truly on the strength of a striking poster or cover art. You would think by now I would at least weigh the plot synopsis or the talent involved, but truth be told, sometimes the poster wins. (Nobody's perfect.) Carlos Tobalina's Jungle Blue has a great one. (I should clarify that you won't find this on Letterboxd, at least until they change their dumbassed "no porno" policy.) Lots of scantily clad women scattered throughout a jungle background. (And a couple of dudes, because we have to hit a ratio. Nobody's perfect.) Scrawled across the top in (mostly) capital letters: "WARNING!! THE JUNGLE IS HOT and WET and IT BRINGS OUT THE BEAST IN YOU!" ("And" is in lowercase both times. Nobody's perfect.) And smack dab in the middle: a grinning gorilla, cradling a shapely nude woman and pointing a banana (not a euphemism) at her. As the bottom right corner says, "Truly, the ball of the wild!" Look, you put a gorilla front and centre on your poster, I'm left with no choice but to watch your movie. Either I'll be treated to a real gorilla or a guy in a gorilla suit, which offers a baseline of entertainment value. There's no way this won't be eighty-odd minutes well spent.

The movie delivers what it promises with its opening shot. A man in a gorilla suit, in flagrante delicto. Yeah, that's right. The gorilla's gettin' it on with a good looking lady. Now, if the entire movie were about this gorilla getting into various shenanigans, this would be a 10/10 movie. Alas, there are other things that happen. Like how the main character, played by Nina Fause, going to the Peruvian jungle to find some priceless jewels and poisoning a bunch of other people in the process. You know Nina is evil because she says in the narration that she plans to do exactly that, which would have been a lot funnier if she said it out loud. Credit to the movie, it looks like they actually did go down to Peru and shoot there, which gives it some power, as Werner Herzog once said, through the "voodoo of location." The condescension in the narration lends it some semblance of commentary similar to the cannibal films popular during the same era, although this is thankfully much more palatable than those.

The movie is also about her scheme to get it on with a legendary immortal man who lives in the jungle and whose only friends are animals. One of these animals is the aforementioned gorilla. Now, you're probably going to point out that gorillas are not native to South America, and you'd be right. Credit to the movie, it definitely knows this, and explains that the gorilla escaped from the circus. There are also chimpanzees and baboons and some other animals which are also not native to South America. The movie does not explain their presence, but it does cut to shots of them, and their genitals, during the sex scenes. Now, I try to approach movies with respect for their original context, and this movie's original context would have been in a porno theatre while a bunch of creepy guys in raincoats jack off in the dark. Did these men time their motions in between the cuts? Did they wait it out until the animals were nowhere near the action? Or did they just power ahead, accepting that the monkeys are inescapable and that maybe that's what they're into now? These are the questions that occurred to me during the movie. It's worth noting that the gorilla suit man gets an extended sex scene later in the movie, perhaps to cater to the audience's evolving tastes.

In between this, we cut to scenes in a hotel with a bunch of people in an orgy. Among the participants are Fause and a few other recognizable faces, like Annette Haven and Candida Royalle. Now, I've seen the former in a few things and I've quite liked her. She's a good actress and quite easy on the eyes, and seeing her name in the credits definitely enticed me. Alas, if you watch this for her, you'll be disappointed as you don't even get a very good look at her. Annette is in the corner, riding away, with nary clear shot of her face. You don't get a good look at Candida either, although you do see that the guy fucking her is wearing a lot of rings, which seems ill-advised in this situation. (I suppose, like Charles Grodin admitted in an interview with David Letterman, that he doesn't know where to put his valuables during such scenes.) The orgy is shot with no real rhythm or shape, the camera drifting in and out of unmotivated and poorly chosen close-ups. Given how much of the film's runtime is devoted to these scenes, I suspect Tobalina either had a bunch of orgy footage that he didn't have a movie for or ran out of money shooting in Peru and needed something cheap to fill up the runtime.

There is one other thing about these scenes that bugged me. Now, I don't lead a terribly interesting personal life. Which is to say, I've never been in an orgy, and am certainly in no position to opine on proper orgy etiquette. But I do think if you're going to host a gathering, you should put some effort into making everyone feel welcome. In this orgy, there are an odd number of participants. Now, you'd think this wouldn't be an issue, but alas, everyone pairs off except this poor schmuck, he's left all by himself to jack off in the corner. When he asks who he's supposed to do it with, they tell him another girl is coming. Again, I am in no way speaking with any authority here, but it seems to defeat the purpose of group sex for everyone to pair off and leave an odd man out. Some of these people could have easily rearranged themselves to facilitate a threesome. Or even a foursome. Or why not a whole daisy chain arrangement? Might have made this scene feel less shapeless.

It's hard to call this a good movie, but for eighty or so minutes, I had a passable time. I have a weakness for jungle adventures, having suffered through enough cannibal movies to eke out those drops of real jungle atmosphere, and as I mentioned above, this is a much easier watch than those. And while I'd hesitate to call Nina Fause a good actress, she's at least easy on the eyes and I didn't mind her line readings. And what can I say, it delivers what the poster promises.