#i have an extremely similar story about elvira

[mrsmarssmith]

my mom was a professional musician and the band she was in once opened for linda ronstadt back in the eighties and she hit on my mom. my mom was bisexual but married to my father at the time so she graciously rebuffed but i sometimes wonder, is there an alternate reality where linda ronstadt is my stepmom?

[inkykeiji]

hello, bby💞💞 i absolutely ADORE everything u write, ur insanely talented!! I wanted to ask, you’ve mentioned several pieces of art, precisely songs and films, that have inspired ur work; could u give us some music and movie recommendations that have similar vibe to some of ur fics??? Thank u in advance, I hope u have an incredible day/evening, lysm💓💞💖

THIS QUESTION OOOOOOOH YES ANON YES okay okay first of all, thank you so much!!!! i appreciate that a lot <333 YES i love film so much hehehe <3 my music recommendations are pretty much the same as they always are. the films i’m recommending here; i’m not exactly sure if they have a similar vibe to my fics as i’ve found it difficult to find many films that fit that criteria, but here’s a nice huge list of films that have influenced my main series’, and how!!

beware!! very long post under the cut hehehe AND POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR BMB IF YOU KNOW THE FILMS HEHEHEHEHE

𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐦𝐲 𝐛𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬

the godfather, part 1 + part 2

AAAAAAAAH okay, literally one of my favourite films of all time, the godfather (+ the godfather pt 2) is a fucking masterpiece. tomura’s close relationship with his father was both inspired by bnha itself as well as michael corleone’s relationship with his father, vito. michael is the golden child even though he’s the youngest, and i love love love how cold and ruthless he can be!!! he’s also super smart.

goodfellas

listen. if henry hill from goodfellas and michael corleone from the godfather had a baby, it would be tomura. he’s slightly more henry than he is michael, but his characterization pulls from both of these characters!! henry is fun, he’s reckless, he’s young, he feels like a god and he loves cocaine. henry also becomes very paranoid, a path with tomura is currently speeding down (albeit much more intensely, with legitimate mental health issues, but you get it). i also love the subtle ‘mafia princess’ trope goodfellas has going on with henry’s wife, karen (that scene where she says she’s going shopping and asks him for money, and he takes out that massive wad of cash?????? brilliant, one of my faves hehehe). henry also has some difficulty dealing with his emotions!!

narcos season 1 + 2

k, i can’t say too much about how this incredible show inspired bmb; i kind of feel like listing it is already giving away too much hehehe BUT i love the pure POWER pablo exudes, and i love his relationship with his wife and how family oriented he is.

scarface (both the original 1932 version and the 1983 version)

WOOOOOOOOOO OKAY. for the 1983 film: cocaine my friends. cocaine and violence and toxic relationships!!!!!!!  i kind of love elvira hancock more than anything else; she’s so glamorous and fun and just aaaaah she’s definitely not as ‘baby’ or ‘good girl’ as bmb!reader is, but her sheer class and cute dresses and just how SPOILED she is reminds me a lot of bmb! for both 1932 + 1983: tony’s relationship with his sister, gina (which tbh borders on incest). gina’s another one of those ‘mafia princess’ types, and tony is extremely overprotective of her and spoils her like mad, too. she’s also fits that ‘good girl’ archetype a lot more!!

reservoir dogs

purely the violence. the violence the violence the violence, the crude and crass way the men talk to each other, and the fact that they’re like a lil organized crime group put together by a boss. i am IN LOVE (IN LOVEEEEEEEE) with mr blonde (aka vic vega <333). mr blonde’s extreme sadism reminds me quite a bit of both dabi and tomura, and he’s even referenced in the lil torture piece i wrote!! also, you literally cannot tell me that vic wouldn’t spoil the absolute HELL out of his good lil princess if he had one <3

(not a film, but!!!!!) hamlet

break my bones is very very very loosely based on hamlet (which is my favourite story of all time. literally. i love hamlet so much i can’t even put it into words); with tomura as hamlet, dabi as a mixture of horatio and laertes, and reader as ophelia. hamlet, my precious baby, is a spoiled fucking brat, who loved his father and was loved by his father. he’s also very intelligent, but falls prey to his indecisiveness and his inability to make decisions, in addition to the rapid decay of his mental health. that’s all i’ll say hehehe

baby driver

the relationship between baby + debora reminds me of the relationship between dabi and reader a lot <333 i also just love the aesthetic of this film, and the undercurrents of organized crime!!

the shining

just a teeny tiny bit; i cannot say anything about this or i think it’ll give something away!!!!!

burning

trios!!!!! trios!!!!!!!!!!!!and the relationship dynamic between jong-su, hae-mi and ben??????? absolutely incredible and reminds me quite a bit of the dynamic between tomura, dabi + reader!!

𝐭𝐚𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐀𝐔 (𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐞) + 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐲𝐚-𝐧𝐢𝐢

i’m grouping these two together, because a lot of their influences overlap in terms of dabi + reader’s relationship!!! (i’m pretty sure we can all agree that touya-nii is so fucking Daddy, too <3)

true romance

i fucking love this movie, so so so much. i’d go as far to say that clarence and alabama’s relationship has without a doubt inspired or influenced every single romantic relationship i’ve written in at least some way, shape, or form. i LOVE them. i love their co-dependency on each other, i love their whole ‘it’s you and me against the world’ vibe, and i love how far they’re willing to go for each other. also, again, organized crime (no surprise), and alabama is just the cutest fucking thing i swear to god. that scene of her + virgil in the hotel room will forever be one of my absolute FAVOURITE scenes in cinematic history. i would die for this woman i love her more than anything. she’s so cute yet so strong, so brave, so IN LOVE, and aaaah that is just one of my favourite characteristics ever ever ever. i love women who are soft and strong at the same time, even if that strength isn’t physical.

sid and nancy

hello to one of the most famous toxic relationships ever!!! honestly, i don’t think i have to explain this one much LMAO. obviously my readers aren’t as hardcore as nancy and almost always fall into the ‘innocent good girl’ category, but their RELATIONSHIP itself reminds me quite a bit of the relationship between touya-nii and his princess <3

bonnie and clyde (1967)

ahahaha yet again, another very toxic, very co-dependent type of love. like clarence and alabama, i love how these two are literally willing to die for each other—they’d go straight to the ends of the earth for one another, no questions asked. this type of love is extremely unhealthy, obviously, but it’s something i am extremely fascinated with and love exploring in my work! also, that whole ‘fuck the world let’s commit crimes together’????? very tag you’re it dabi x reader!!!

pulp fiction

more specifically, the relationship between mia and vincent. the sexual tension there is fucking crazy, and i love how mia is yet again one of those ‘mafia princess’ types. really, this film applies to bmb as well, but i’m putting it here because the way vincent gets so so SO soft for mia reminds me of the way touya-nii and dabi in these two series in particular get soft for their readers. also, to a lesser extent, the relationship between butch and fabienne. i know a lot of people don’t like fabienne and get annoyed with her, but i think she’s just the cutest thing and i heavily relate to her and her babie/crybaby nature <3 and of course, the relationship between pumpkin and honeybunny (for tag you’re it especially!) <33

breathless (a bout de souffle)

there’s just something about michel that reminds me of touya-nii SO much. i think it’s a combination of his attitude as well as his petty life of crime, and the way patricia hides him in her apartment...i don’t know, it’s difficult for me to put into words, but i love him a lot <3

𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐦𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤

the joker + harley quinn: i feel like this is so obvious LMAO but i’m obsessed with the idea of that all consuming voracious love that borders on serious obsession. extremely possessive socio/psychopath and his dumb lil baby????? yes <3 (**i also wanna make a note to say that harley isn’t dumb AT ALL, but J will often insult her in such a way, and sometimes the men who write her portray her as such as well >.> but harley is one of my favourite female characters ever. i LOVE how girly and fun she is while still being extremely strong and (sometimes, depending on the version) independent. she isn’t without flaws, and i love how her mr j is basically her kryptonite <3)

speaking of batman, bruce wayne: what can i say, i just love spoiled rich men who have serious issues dealing with their emotions and walk the line of good and evil <33333

anakin skywalker/darth vader: listen, anakin was seriously slighted by those prequel films. but underneath all of that bad writing, at his core, anakin is a fantastic character. he is SO strongly governed by his emotions and is extremely selfish, and his love for his wife and family is ultimately what leads him down the path to the dark side <3 his emotionally charged motivations remind me a lot of CANON dabi!!!

thelma and louise: i just love their relationship, like, a lot hehehe. their relationship and the ending of this film reminds me a lot of my snowman & me; just yet again that whole ‘it’s you and me or it’s death’ type thing.

the darjeeling limited: it should be obvious at this point that i love trios, and i love complex characters and the relationships that come along with them. the relationship between the whitman brothers, the dysfunctional family, the truama and sadness...i love it all. this film is absolutely beautiful and really doesn’t connect much to my work other than the character dynamics, but i love it so dearly.

mad men: again, those misogynistic toxic relationships and the dependency betty has on don for the first few seasons!! also my god, the aesthetic, i am obsessed.

twin peaks: this hasn’t shown up too much in the work i’ve posted on my blog just yet, but i’m head over heels in love with the dreamy unsettling feeling that saturates this entire series, as well as the drugs and crime. also dale is my baby, protect him with everything <3

blade runner (both films): for city aesthetic

suckerpunch: an absolutely awful film but also one of my guilty pleasures, purely because i love babydoll so so so so so much <33 again, more for aesthetic than story.

𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂

honestly, my music recommendations are exactly the same as they are in this post right here. lana del rey, lil peep, chase atlantic + the neighbourhood are the four that i’d say influence my work the most tho, and have the most similar vibe to my stuff!! also, nicole dollanganger is an incredible artist and lyricist, and i’ve been told more than once that my work and her work are quite similar (which i agree!!!). her stuff is hauntingly beautiful, but i have a lot of difficulty listening to it because it hits a little too close to home and makes me cry literally every single time. so please be wary of that, i’m giving a general trigger warning for her because she can get quite dark. but her work is absolutely fantastic, i highly recommend as long as you feel that you can handle it!!! <33

AAAAAH I KNOW I’M MISSING LIKE A MILLION THINGS I SWEAR but these are the films (and tv shows) + artists that readily come to mind!! thank you again for your question anon, i love stuff like this so much and i love discussing films and art hehehe <33

[manychocolatefactories]

CatCF Dark Chocolate: Part 1, the Kids

About this version:

This retelling was mostly inspired by the original book, as well as Dahl's first drafts for it. I wanted a more old-fashioned feeling to it: in this setting television is still only present in rich and upper-class houses, the regular people using newspaper and radios to get information. Imagine a mix of 40s and 50s with some touches of 60s thrown in.

You have here 8 Golden Tickets.

  First winner: Augustus Pottle

(Based on Augustus Gloop )

Augustus Pottle is an enormously fat boy, with a head like a ball of dough and a body like a blimp. He bears an uncanny ressemblance to a pig: he has a pink and greasy skin, numerous folds of flesh and chins bulging out of his neck, small greedy eyes, and an upturned and always sniffing nose looking like a snout. All the outfits he wears are always much too tight for him or about to pop (and it doesn't help that he literaly gains weight the minute he eats something). He has two outfits during the story (inspired by the two outfits Quentin Blake drew for him): during his interview he wears a green jacket, brown pants and a turquoise shirt ; and during the tour he wears beige pants, a blue jacket and a white shirt with pink spots. Of course he can never wear his jackets and his shirts are always about to rip.

Eating is not just Augustus hobby and obsession - it is also his career. Augustus is considered a "champion" because he kept winning eating contests: the biggest eater, the fastest eater, the fattest eater... It all comes down to his mother, a thick lady wearing a lot of shiny but ugly jewelery. Mrs. Gloop always tried to find fame and attention, but when her attempts to find it at radio failed, she reported all her dreams on his son: he had inherited from his tall and bearded father a large and stout body. People were amazed at how big and gluttonous the boy was, and Mrs. Gloop thought it was an excellent way to get attention and fame. So she bred him to become the fattest and most gluttonous boy alive, so that everyone would look at him (and at her). It goes so far that Augustus is used to sleep in the dining room - being so full after meals he can't even pass the door to get up to his bedroom.

The excess of greasy and sugary food made his brain fat too, clogging it with blubber, and resulting in him being quite simple-minded. He only now has two thoughts in his brain. The first is "eat, eat, eat", he is a true glutton obsessed with eating and devouring. The second is "I'm a champion, I'm the best, I need to beat everyone else", he sees others as rivals and life as a contest, and his own fatness and gluttony is for him a sign of dominance over other people.

Second winner: Elvira Salt

(Based on Veruca Salt)

I wanted here to get away from the angry, screaming, demanding Veruca Salt, so I create this character.

Just like Veruca, Elvira is a spoiled and filfthy rich girl who thinks she can get everything she wants with money or by asking. But she is not an angry, screaming, bratty child. She rather believes it is natural and normal for her to have everything, or for money to solve every problem. She seems detached from the world. She doesn't think or believe one would say "No" to her, and basically considers the entire world to be a shop with people at her service, or a field from which she can pick flowers without a care.

She looks like a glamorous movie star of old, like Marilyn Monroe, always wearing elegant silk dresses and gloves and wearing fur coats (with furs of lovely and cute animals like guinea pigs, mink, chinchilla or rabbits). In fact, Elvira enjoys only things that are cute, pleasant or elegant. For example give her the biggest pearl in the world - if said pearl is actually ugly she will throw it out without a care. She is a girl that bathes in milk and honey, that has for a snack expensive truffes, foie gras, chocolate and champaign, that doesn't walk but get carried around, and that considers it normal for a young girl to receive as gifts emeralds, rubies, diamonds and other precious jewels. To put it shortly, she lives an extravagant and excentric life.  Always smiling, always happy, always content, she basically lives in a world of luxury where misery, poverty or lack of money does not exist, and as a result actually forgets that other people around hers have needs and desires too. She thinks she is the princess of some sort of fairytales, and the others are just background characters here to serve her story.

For the tour, she wears a candy-pink velvet dress and a "fur" made of clubbed baby seals. As her father... well fun fact, Elvira sepnds so much money her father actually looks like a beggar or a homeless man, because he has no money left for himself - but a beggar with plump and thick wallets in his pockets.

  Third winner: Violet Beauregard

(Based on Violet Beauregarde)

The Beauregard parents (who look so similar to each other it is difficult to say who is the father and who is the mother) are competition freaks. They are obsessed with their children being the best, breaking records, being a champion, earning trophies.

However, for their misery, they got Violet. Violet isn't good at sports, neither at school. She doesn't have any talent for anything. She doesn't have any interest or dreams. She is a plain, dull girl wearing plain and dull clothes, with dim eyes and a big mop of hair of an undetermined color. The only thing that stands out is her great, thick, muscular jaw - because her parents, desperate that they were, found a way for her to be a champion. Chewing gum. She spends her time chewing gum, so that would be her talent, isn't it? Her parents worked hard to make chewing a sportive and intellectual talent, making her break unexisting records of gum-chewing, organizing uninteresting chewing contests... They now think that their little girl deserves to be with Olympic champions just for chewing-gum, forgetting how useless and stupid this is.

They also extended her "abilities" to chewing other kind of foods and candies, including chewing chocolate bars: and here she found the Golden Ticket, which was a dream come true for the Beauregard parents, a perfect mediatic exposure! Fun fact: Violet chewed a bit of her Golden Ticket.

   Fourth winner(s): Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck

(Based on Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck)

I wanted to reuse the characters from the deleted "Fudge Mountain" chapter of the book. A lot of this characterization is my own invention: I based myself on the few personnality clues found in the chapter, and for their appearance I used Quentin Blake's illustrations.

Tommy and Wilbur are best friends in the world. They are neighbors, they go to school together, they always share everything (even though they may fight for it first) - this is why when they discovered the fourth Golden Ticket they shared it. However their friendship is filled with a strange sort of disdain, and they really bond over their main hobby: pranking people. They like to do pranks and jokes and to have a good laugh. Unfortunately for everyone else, they are devilish little brats and cruel children, whose definition of a good laugh involves making believe someone's house was robbed, putting someone's dress on fire or pretending their little brother is dead. The worst is hurts or distress people, the better it will be for them. Causing black outs, using dangerous chemical products, hurting their own parents, it is all just a good fun.

The Rice family are the definition of bourgeois and nouveau riche, small shop owners who became extremely wealthy thanks to their trade. As a result they are boasting their money and spending a lot of it: their small house became bloated with numerous architectural additions that don't fit with each other, and they collect cars, having so much they can't even drive them all. Mr. Rice is a tall and very thin man always dressed in expensive but ugly suits and with a thick mustache looking like a caterpillar, while Wilbur is a small dark-haired boy with a round face and a round belly, chubby and flabby. Wilbur is an arrogant, haughty, snobbish boy that is friend with Tommy only because he thinks of him as a sort of "pet" - he is so arrogant that he also disdains his own parents, but Mr. Rice merely thinks Wilbur is being a "good lad", an "energetic boy" or a "little man" and is quite proud of this unruliness.

The Troutbeck family is the opposite of the Rice. They used to be nobility, living in a great manor, but they fell on hard times. Their nobility title not worth anything, money flying by, their family fell into poverty. They still live in their manor, but it is now run-down, dirty and unkept. Mrs. Troutbeck is an obese woman always wearing faded pajamas or worn-out jumpsuits and a thick layer of makeup, and Tommy is a tall and thin boy, skinny, with an angular face covered in moles, beauty marks and freckles. He has spiky strawberry blond hair and always wears tattered ans stained clothes. The Rice parents are hoarding misers, skinflints who refuse to spend and disdain the "show-off" Rice (the same way the Rice disdain the poor and "low" Troutbeck), in fact they only had a kid so he could later work and make money for them, and they encourage him to steal rather than buy things. Tommy is also a rude, violent boy, known to punch and insult all those that displease him - something he inherited from his parents, that also raised him with insults and slaps on the head (no wonder he doesn't have any respect for them).

The two kids have another element cementing their friendship: their love for candies. Wilbur spends his time buying candies to stuff his belly, and Tommy keeps stealing candies from other children, messily devouring them. And it is during one of their sugary feasts that they found the Golden Ticket.

For the tour, Wilbur is wearing a light blue jacket with a red bow tie, and Tommy a navy-blue turtleneck.

   Fifth winner:Michael Themmen-Vry

(Based on Mike Teavee)

This name was a suggestion of ArtMakerProductions, who said I could invent a name whihc would have "T-V" initials. So I created Themmen-Vry, a name based on the names of the two actors who played Mike Teavee.

The Themmen-Vry family is exceedingly rich, grossly rich. But the Themmen-Vry parents are quite pleasant people: the father friendly and affable despite looking like a pigmy hippo, and the mother being an excellent hostess despite not being very bright and quite young. However their sson... it's a different story.

Michael is the oldest of the winners, being near the end of the his teenage years and almost a man. But he stayed stuck to the mental age of a child. Michael adores television, he has several elevision sets in every room of his manor to never miss his favorite shows. And Michael always liked to play, to disguise himself as his heroes. Couple that with very wealthy and very permissive parents, and you get this brat. Michael always plays at some game when he isn't watching television. He has an impressive array of costumes and toys to play with, and when he plays, he truly plays. He forces everyone to get into his roleplay and refer to him by his fictional identities. He forces other people into playing with him - he even kidnaps children from the nearby school to play with him. And he also wants realism to go so far... well let's say he won't be afraid to use a real gun to play a hunter. His parents are so permissive, seeing this as merely "harmless childish fun", that they allowed their manor to be burned down only because Michael wanted to play a firefighter.

No need to also mention you that Michael is a self-centered and disdainful brat that is always the hero of his stories and that uses "playing" as an excuse to bully and insult other people by having them be villains, monsters or preys. Basically he is the ultimate worst RPG player you can think of.

Tall and thin, Michael has long  and thick hair covering his ears and forehead like a helmet, and a face covered in acne. As for his outfits, they change all the time: one time he is dressed as a mad hunter, another time he is a monster-killing alien-king, another time he is a ninja-cowboy from the Far West, and that's when he is not a policeman-Robin Hood.

His outfit for the tour is a vividly colored cosmonaut outfit, and he is armed with a ray gun. Actually a laser gun using real, harmful lasers. He is also one of the few kids allowed to come to th tour without his parents, due to him being old enough.

     Sixth winner: Marvin Prune

(Based on Marvin Prune)

In the original drafts of Roald Dahl, Marvin Prune was a conceited school-obsessed boy that embodied the "all work and no play" mentality, disdaining all childish fun and freedom and rather dedicating himself to harsh studies and strict intellect. I decided to reuse this concept for a new interpretation:

Marvin Prune and his parents (his father, a man with a face like a boiled onio, and his mother, a woman who looks a lot like a donkey) are extremely arrogant and conceited so-called intellectuals. Marvin Prune thinks of himself as superior to everyone else and more intelligent than others because he read a lot of books, learned a lot of things and is an excellent school student. As a result, he thinks that he has all the rights to disdain others, insult them, treat them as complete idiots. But the thing is that Marvin actually has a very poor knowledge of the world and his "intellect" is up to discussion. He has numerous facts wrong - for exemple he thinks sugar comes naturally as a white powder and can't exist under any other forms, or he believes all the ancient Greek artworks were entirely white and that Greeks never used colors. If he gets so many of his facts wrong, it is because he believes simply learning about something is enough to be an expert - for exemple he claims to know all about foreign countries because he read about them in books, but he actually never visited them or met people from said countries.

This arrogance and this quest for "intellectuality" leads the Prunes to worship all that is "antique" "ancient" or "proper" - which results in them only collecting ancient furnitures, putting dust and cobwebs in their house to make it look more ancient, and Marvin wearing outdated outfits, like puff ties or jabots. He also likes to wear glasses, though he doesn't need them - he just thinks wearing glasses makes him look more intelligent. With narrow shoulders and chocolate-colored curls, the most defining trait of Marvin is his nose, which is really big, really long, really pointy and sharp, compared to a shark's fin. He always uses the royal plural "we" instead of "I" because he believes himself to be the most intelligent boy of the country or perhaps the world, and this bloated ego of him actually leads to a darker side of his personnality: he disdains all that is considered childish and worthless, up to the point of destruction. For exemple, he only reads encyclopedia, scientific books and teaching manuals. As for the rest - children book, novels, comic books... he deems them irrelevant and stupid and so wishes to burn all of them. Yep, we have a little book burner here.

Marvin only searched for a Golden Ticket because he wished to learn more about the Wonka Factory and know all of its secrets, as well as to be able to "correct" Wonka - because he is that kind of kid that considers everybody else is doing things wrong, and that he knows how to fix mistakes and improve everything. And he pretends that to find his Golden Ticket he used a lot of calculations, planning and studies, comparing the weather, selling patterns, geography, trafic levels... but in truth he actually got it by pure luck.

   Seventh winner: Bertie Upside

(Based on Bertie Upside)

Bertie Upside actually surprises everyone because he isn't a brat like the other kids. He is a wealthy and rich orphan, but he is kind, healthy, gentle, generous, cute, humble, decent giving money to charity and being very respectful and wise. He sees the best in people, and during the tour he prevents the other kids from breaking the rules or bullying Charlie, deeming him a true "bore". He is basically the perfect kid, that is repeatedly said to have a "heart of gold".

For his physical appearance I based him on Quentin Blake's illustration of Charlie: tall and thin, blond with blue eyes. He always has clothes that match his hair and eyes: light blue jacket and yellow tie for his interview, and golden jacket with light blue shirt for the tour.

   Eighth winner: Charlie Bucket

(Based on Charlie Bucket)

This Charlie I based on the original drafts of Roald Dahl, which depicted Charlie as black.

As usual Charlie is a small malnourished boy, all skins and bones, living with his poor family in a shabby and run-down house. His father is a newspaper deliveryman, which is how the Bucket family has a newspaper every morning, and his mother works at a toothpaste factory (like in the 2005 movie). Their job doesn't bring much money, but it is enough to survive. As for the Grandparents you have Grandpa Georges (got his leg cut off after the war, and is always criticizing, insulting and being revolted by the other Golden Ticket winners), Grandma Georgina (can't walk due to the family being too poor to have her hip and knee fixed, she quells and calms her husband's wrath and fury), Grandma Josephine (has a weak heart and can't do a lot of physical activities, but has a wild an insane past, resulting in her often telling stories not suited for kids) and Grandpa Joe (bad arthritis, usually tempers or censors his wife's stories).

Charlie tries to help his family: he makes a bit of money by collecting glass bottles and metallic scraps. As for the food the Bucket family survives with, I wanted to include elements of the "soul food": as a result the daily diet of the Buckets is black-eyed peas, turnips and sweet potatoes. When they have enough money they buy a pork feet or a chicken liver to add meat to their diet, but it is quite rare. Charlie is a little angel of a kid, ever complaining, working hard at school and always sharing what he has with his family.

[leporellian]

Opera production game: Don Giovanni

oh fuck oh god I have so many concepts for don g. I don’t even know WHERE to start. HOWEVER given my current status as The School’s Director For Play I Wrote That Is Most Definitely Adjacent To Don Giovanni, I can at least speak with like, the SMALLEST sliver of experience on this one

F I R S T O F A L L fuck productions that make the don some kind of hero or at the least make out the whole sexual assault thing to be ‘not his fault’ somehow. FUCK that noise. when I see a bitch that says donna anna wanted it I FUCKING FLOOR IT. you know who the true antihero in this opera is? leporello. I realize that like, being a Dumbass Leporello Stan is my wholeass brand, but hear me out. leporello and elvira are the actual main characters. they’re the whole spine of the story, because they’re closest to the don himself. also, finally, they’re both good people. like I know the Hot Thing rn is making lep a mean bastard but they’re WRONG i HATE that, but since I've already gone into extensive detail on why leporello is a Good Person At Heart here I think I can move on. anyway lep and el are the main characters keep this in mind.don giovanni isn’t really even a character. if anything he’s something of an object. dude is an entirely flat character, his only trait being Jerkass. he doesn’t feel real. he still acts like a commedia dell’arte character, everyone else feels like a real human being. it makes it jarring- leporello and elvira keep trying to get him to act decently for once, but it’s like they’re talking to a brick wall. he can’t act decently. it’s not a concept he can even think of. as a flat character he physically can’t.as for everyone else, I could analyze them in a long ass rambling way but i don’t think I have the space here. so to keep things short: I love donna anna and 100% believe her because the narrative of falsified rape is extremely irresponsible and dangerous especially in this age, zerlina and masetto are the only loving relationship in the opera and they learn how to communicate with each other better over the course of the story, and, finally, ottavio is an incel.

MEANWHILE. COSTUMES. everyone wears a different color. anna and her father both wear jade green. ottavio wears like, a dark cyan. zerlina and masetto are both different shades of a more yellowish green. elvira is purple. leporello is yellowish brown. however all of these costumes look realistic to the point they could be real clothing, besides the color coding. like here’s how lep would look for example.

(also, note the feathers look like rabbit ears. leporello’s name means “the little rabbit” and I WILL run with that symbolism.)

but meanwhile the don himself looks like this:

bright red tabasco sauce jar lookin motherfucker. his costume is purposely cartoonishly bright and oversimplified. it matches him. when lep and the don swap clothes, they actually wear entirely different costumes. when lep wears the don’s clothes, they become muted and real looking just like lep. but when the don wears lep’s clothes they suddenly become garish and cartoony like him.

THE SET meanwhile I have plans for that. the set is on a turntable like device but it’s disguised in such a way that the audience never sees it turn (the lights always dim) so it just looks like really fast set changes. having the turntable like this means that when one scene happens the set for the other can be already being set up so scene changes are way quicker, which will work for things like the graveyard scene that I imagine as having two sets (one just beyond the cemetery gates where lep and the don meet up, and the other right by the statue when the don walks over to investigate it). the act one party takes place on a set of raised platforms that both show the audience what every character is doing in the chaos but also rather eerily resembles a wedding cake. similarly leporello starts singing madamina from a podium like thing but eventually steps down from it after about 40 seconds into the song and sings the rest of the song looking more and more sad because madamina is a SAD song where leporello is SAD and NOBODY manages to stage it right except maybe the lyric opera when I was there. the act 2 dinner looks very pathetic in a way, with how the don is all to himself with only the ever present lep and elvira there. that’s the thing about flat characters, the second they’re alone, they might as well be nothing.

also. the statue. yknow the whole ‘man in plaster’ thing? fuck that. when the don and lep see the statue, the actual man part of the statue is barely carved yet, looking only vaguely humanoid. the only thing that’s carved recognizably enough is the horse it’s sitting on, and then the only thing that’s been finished is the horse’s head, which is pure nightmare fuel. this statue will actually look scary.

when the statue arrives to dinner, it’s a horrific eldritch abomination. it jerks unpredictably in sudden, quick movements. it still resembles a man on a horse, but the man is just a vague shadow, with no features that can be made out above the shoulders. the horse meanwhile? a skull is its head, and its body looks like something out of chernobyl- but it always seems to change a little every few moments, making it very indistinct. the whole being seems to talk from the horse’s skull instead of the man. it’s absolutely horrifying, and to me that makes it just lovely.

idk horse skulls just are way more terrifying than anything a human could be

the finale sextet is included because 1) the opera isn’t about the don it’s about the characters and stories around him and 2) it’s a bop Fuck You. we end with leporello and elvira alone on the stage. they’re about to go their separate ways, when they both turn to each other and, lopsidedly, walk away together with a sense of solidarity. sure, they no longer have the don, the man they both thought they loved. but they now have a sense of solidarity in each other, which was in the end what they both really needed. (their bond isn’t romantic- it’s a platonic bond forged from Similar Experiences because I see 2 characters develop a platonic and deep mutual understanding of each other from a similar traumatic event and I go APESHIT.

either that or swap out ottavio and elvira’s parts because ottavio doesn’t deserve anna but anna and elvira deserve each other GAY RIGHTS. or both at the same time that’d be possible too. I dunno I just don’t like that leporello doesn’t get a better situation and elvira ends up in a convent that just doesn’t seem Right

this isn’t all of my ideas this is just all the ones I can fit into this post I fucking love this opera so much and its characters deserve to be treated by directors MUCH better

[riotatthemovies]

the famous.. dare I say infamous Brain that wouldn’t Die! It was the movie that Mystery science theatre riffed when they past the hosting torch from Joel to Mike. 

I think the movie was probably considered quite edgy at the time it came out (1962, yet with its cheapness it feels even earlier) not just because it was a mad scientist that kept his lovers head alive on a tray but because of the attitude of the characters. In a story arch that definitely inspired Frankenhooker as the extremely smooth ,  sexy and strangely nice Dr. Bill visits seedy strip joints and gin joints to find sexy women that won't be missed to use their body parts to build a new body for his recently, semi deceased fiance.  Along the way he discovers everything he does is just driven by obsession as his scientist experiments, including a monster he has in his basement, to his relationship with his fiance are just because he is obsessed. His personality seems so different from the life he lives which at first seems like a directing mistake but I doubt it because it is what makes him so interesting, his kindness yet blatant misogyny and lack of concern for life may be looked at as how the 60s man was but thats insane this movie knew it and was delivering it in an extremely straight faced yet sarcastic and cynical way that I am sure made a 60s audience uncomfortable and makes us laugh today. 

There is going to be a remake released this year, not a big budget one but a homemade one so it feels very similar in cheese and estectic to the original, however I wonder if they will just make it all about “mansplaining” this time.

I have this movie in 3 different versions in my collection, regular on a b movie compilation, the MST3K version and then the more recent Elvira hosted edition.

This morning I watch the Elvira hosted one just so I could talk about it. I love Elvira and she has aged so well and her humor and cuteness is still spot on but this direct to dvd remakes of her old show are missing something... the commercial breaks. She starts and ends the movie with her humor but she does not give you multiple breaks to pace it out which is what made it so good for these movies. Sometimes on these new ones she pops up in the corner of the screen to make a riff track style comment which feels forced and not her. They should have added fake commercials the extreme short running time of these movie could afford to have it. But its ok I still love yeah Elvira.

[uomo-accattivante]

In 2012, actor Oscar Isaac and dancer Bobbi Jene Smith, friends from Juilliard, sat across from each other in a room in New York City and performed a piece choreographed by Smith called Arrowed. Smith has described it as “a dance without any movement”; based on an Internet video of the performance, I would call it more of an interview or an interrogation. In that clip, Isaac sits on one side of a stage, Smith on the other, and he asks her a series of questions, some banal (“Where are you from? Do you drink? Do you smoke?”), others cryptic (“Are you an anchor or an arrow? Are you waiting or weighed down?”). At first the tone is friendly and inquisitive, and she is leisurely and thoughtful with her responses. Soon the questions begin repeating, faster and faster each time, more probing, more intrusive, more difficult to react to. Smith becomes palpably flustered. As the pressure mounts, her answers begin to change, to contradict.

Lind and Smith began corresponding, and eventually Lind traveled to Sweden, where the Iowa-born Smith, on hiatus from her longtime gig as a principal with the prestigious Israeli dance company Batsheva, was performing with choreographer Sharon Eyal’s troupe. The filmmaker arrived by train, “quite nervous,” to ask if Smith would be open to doing a documentary. “This is such a weird thing,” Lind remembers. “It’s a little bit like: Will you marry me? But like: Will you marry me and my camera?”

That makes more sense when you see Bobbi Jene, Lind’s new film, in theaters now. I’m sitting across from the director and her subject at a sidewalk café just a few blocks from where their project won top documentary honors at the Tribeca Film Festival this past spring. Shot over the course of three years, Bobbi Jene is a feat of vérité filmmaking, so intensely intimate that “intensely intimate” doesn’t really do it justice. Partly that’s a tribute to Lind’s masterful fly-on-the-wall maneuvering. “The way I work is basically I do everything I can do to disappear,” she explains. “Then I can make a film where it’s not at the forefront of Bobbi’s mind that there’s someone capturing her thoughts. It doesn’t become part of her . . . consideration.”

But it’s equally a tribute to Smith’s remarkable ability to move through the world without artifice and her willingness to trust-fall into Lind’s vision. “Bobbi knows at any point she can say, I don’t want this to be seen by anyone,” Lind goes on. “And at the same time, I’m going to film it. Because maybe in two years you’ll be like: I’m so glad you filmed that.” Smith nods and describes a scene that ended up making it into the documentary: Desperate to be alone in a moment of anguish, she realized, “Oh, actually the moments when I don’t want her there, those are when she gets to do what she loves.”

“Oh,” Lind exclaims. “That’s so sweet!”

At the film’s outset, Smith has just made the decision, in her own parlance, to be an arrow not an anchor, to strike out on her own as a dancer and choreographer. It’s a choice that means parting ways with Batsheva, her creative home for nearly 10 years, and with its charismatic artistic director (also her former lover), Ohad Naharin, whose fluid, intuitive movement language, Gaga, is Smith’s dancing vernacular. It also means leaving behind Tel Aviv, the city where she’d relocated at Naharin’s invitation as a 21-year-old Juilliard dropout, and saying goodbye—geographically, if not emotionally—to Or Schraiber, the Israeli Batsheva dancer, 10 years her junior, with whom she had fallen deeply in love.

Lind trails her subject as she performs her last shows in Israel, then moves back to the States, first to San Francisco, then to New York City. She reconnects with her family, particularly with her devoutly Christian mother, who admires her daughter’s courage but worries about her more free-spirited ways. We see Smith struggling with Schraiber’s absence, reckoning with his reluctance to join her in America, with their considerable age gap (“Maybe we think similarly,” he tells her, “but we are not in the same place”). We’re in the room for their wrenching reunions and partings of ways (and for some mildly NSFW Skype sessions in between). And we watch her work to channel her personal trials into A Study on Effort, a powerfully provocative new solo piece that Smith, a magnetic dancer, performs naked for a live audience, with only her very long hair as a veil.

In one bit she braces her arms against an imaginary wall, pushing with all her might, the sinews of her impressively chiseled body tightening and quivering with exertion. In another, she throws her arms up in the air, over and over again, like a woman raging at a cruel god, a heaving motion that takes on its own momentum. The longer she does it, the harder it is to read whether it’s gravity or her body that’s doing the work. And at the end of the performance, she drags a sandbag onto the stage, lies facedown on top of it, and grinds her hips against its mass, shuddering and moaning until she achieves, spectacularly, an orgasm.

It’s a sexual act, though not particularly sexy, or at least it’s not meant to be. Even as she performs it publicly, nakedly, there’s something unnervingly internal about it, centered, extremely private. She’s playing with ideas she learned from Naharin, “about effort and pleasure and pain and pleasure,” she tells the camera, “and how it’s just a switch. It’s the same thing.” But the piece is also a radical reclamation of the naked female body, and of female pleasure, as something separate from the familiar framework of shame and purity and modesty, and, though there are men in the audience watching, as something utterly apart from the male gaze or external desire.

Bobbi Jene is radical, too: It’s a film that says incremental progress and process are as important as monumental feats of achievement. It’s a portrait of an artist coming out of a long incubation period, seeking and finding her own voice, the kind of female artistic bildungsroman that’s still in terribly short supply in our culture, and the kind of female sexual bildungsroman that’s still almost entirely absent. It’s also the story of a woman of a certain age—at the beginning of the film Smith expresses dismay at her looming 30th birthday—who is claiming her body for her own purposes, and about what happens when she bets on one kind of creative potential over another. “I could have danced there longer,” Smith tells me of Batsheva, “and settled down, continued. But I felt like I wasn’t able to make the separation between what was my work and what I gave to the company. What do I want to say to the world? I feel like a lot of times in life we’re waiting for that aha moment that’s like, okay, now is the time to go. One day I woke up and was like, that moment doesn’t exist. It’s not real. It’s an abstract idea. That pushed me off the cliff, the moment when I realized there is no moment.”

Smith’s ambivalence about having children hovers at the margins of this movie, alluded to but never directly addressed. It goes unspoken that childbearing—not to mention child rearing—would take a major toll on a dancer’s career, as it would, to a different extent, on any creative work. These were questions that were very much on Lind’s mind during the years she was filming. “There’s a primal scream,” she says. “It’s really loud. You kind of don’t want to hear it, but it’s the body that’s talking to us. And we have to face these things. To have a baby, and to settle, and be a mother, is different than for a man. It takes up a different volume in your life. It’s something I really battled with. And it helped me a lot to work with it, to see it from a different perspective.” Toward the end of the long process of making Bobbi Jene, she and Isaac were trying and failing to conceive. “Maybe I had to finish the film first,” she surmises. “My body was like, nope, not yet.” She got pregnant as soon as editing was done, went into labor during the documentary’s Tribeca premiere, and gave birth shortly thereafter to a son.

In Smith’s life, the big news is that Schraiber finally joined her this fall in New York. She breaks into a big, shy grin when I ask her about him. “I’m so moved that he came,” she says, her voice wavering. When I spoke with Lind and Smith it was a few days ahead of when Bobbi Jene would officially hit theaters, and Smith admitted to being anxious and a little out of sorts. At one point in the film she talks to Lind about the limited upside of being a dancer. “It’s just . . . keep working. It doesn’t have a payoff like acting or even film. Performing arts don’t have that. Or music: You can have one song and you can get royalties. The equivalent in the dance world is you make one really great solo. And maybe some people will see it. That’s it.”

Unless, of course, someone makes a documentary about you, and then there’s a pretty good chance that thousands and thousands of people will see your work, in all its complexity, in any number of contexts. It’s very different, after all, to perform a naked sexual act for the type of solemnly reverential performing arts enthusiast who might buy a ticket to an avant-garde dance recital, and to do so in front of a camera, in footage that will be available for the foreseeable future to anyone with an iTunes account or a Netflix log-in. “You could go back and watch it, that one moment,” Smith acknowledges. “It feels very vulnerable in a way that I’m not used to. With live performance, part of the magic is that it disappears. And it becomes a memory. It’s like”—she gestures toward me, then back to herself—“I’m with you. You’re with me. It’s a dialogue. And now it’s different.”

It’s a coincidence that last winter also saw the U.S. release of Mr. Gaga, a documentary by Israeli director Tomar Heyman, about Naharin, Smith’s longtime mentor. That film, a more straightforward survey of its subject’s life and work, ranks as the most successful documentary in Israeli history. It’s a fascinating companion piece to Bobbi Jene, but some reviewers have drawn unflattering comparisons. Variety called Bobbi Jene “considerably less rewarding than last year’s Mr. Gaga . . . alongside which this new film feels like a footnote.” A critic at RogerEbert.com said of the attention paid to Smith’s romantic and personal quandaries: “We all have these problems. Who cares?”

But it’s precisely because we all have these problems that we ought to care. “The personal is political,” a truism, sure, but never truer than in this documentary, which shines a spotlight on a woman gambling on security and love, betting on herself and her ideas, using her body as she sees fit—and doing all those things at an age when society quite frankly discourages women from taking such risks. Bobbi Jene is quietly exceptional, unique because of the unique nerve and talent of its subject (that much is evident having spent just an hour with her), and universal, even mundane, because the questions that plague Smith—how to balance ambition and creative drive and personal fulfillment and biological reality—will be deeply, painfully familiar to any woman staring down the ticking clock of her young adulthood. Lind’s film makes the case that these kinds of stories are not mere footnotes, but ones well worth telling. And anyone enlightened enough to see past the great-men theory of history would probably agree.

One scene from the film reveals Smith spreading the gospel of Gaga to a class of dancers. (Teaching, she tells me, may be her true calling: “I speak through my body, and actually that feels like my work, where I meet people in the studio. Letting them know how much power they have, how loud their voices can be.”) Demonstrating a movement, she grabs her ankle behind her, uses the momentum to spin her body around, plants her foot, and then swoops her clasped hands under her parted legs so that she’s contorted into a standing backbend. “And you just have to hope for the best,” she admits to her students as they try, clumsily, to imitate her. “Usually it’s a 70 percent chance. Thirty percent I hit my head really hard on the floor, 70 percent I don’t. But you’re not going to die.”

You give into the motion, you accept pain as a possible side effect: that seems to be Smith’s philosophy both in and out of the studio. “It’s terrifying, it’s humbling,” she says of watching the finished film. “I remember thinking, like, Oh, maybe that part I don’t like, that movement. I could do that much better.” She glances at Lind. “Then I realized: She probably spent hours on it, dreamed on it, changed it, cut it one second earlier, got a glass of wine, came back to it, tried it with different music. And that’s what she landed on. I need to trust that this is the right decision that she wants to make.” Smith goes on: “This is my life, but this is Elvira’s art. It was an amazing lesson in letting go.”

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