When Kafka Said “all The Love In The World Is Useless When There Is Total Lack Of Understanding”

The four penguins from Madagascar are, somehow, isekaied in the middle of the clone wars

I'm really not appreciating how streaming is being used as a general dumping ground for anything the studio isn't 100% sold on.

I just saw No One Will Save You and that should have been in theaters. It's a great film and easily could go up against the other horror out now. Same thing happened with Annihilation and Prey.

Stand by your films! They're well made and audiences actually do like it when movies are willing to get a little weird or off the beaten track.

Anyway Barbie sitting on a bench, just having cried for the first time and looking over at an old woman and very genuinely complimenting her beauty was such a lovely moment. Because not long before, Barbie was freaking out about cellulite. But here in the Real World, where everything is so much more complicated than she could have imagined, so much more painful, she looks over and sees a woman who has actually lived. Aging is a privilege not afforded to everybody, and this little old woman, with all these years and experiences inside her, quite happy and at peace and secure with herself (she knows she’s beautiful), represents what Barbie is only starting to understand, that real death is staying the same forever.

That’s why it’s so important that The Ghost Of Ruth Handler, a little old lady herself, is the one who guides her into real life. She warns Barbie that by choosing to live, she must by necessity die. But in keeping with the themes of growing up, of adulthood, of womanhood, Barbie now knows that you can’t ever really return to the version of yourself that didn’t know something. Children, most children anyway, don’t really understand death. Part of the emotional struggle of adolescence and young adulthood is having to come to grips with the inevitable fact that your parents will die someday, as will everyone you love, and you yourself. If you’re lucky, not for many years. But it will happen.

And I think that’s why the turning point is “do you guys ever think about dying?” That’s why it matters that the girl playing with Barbie and changing her is a middle-aged woman. Gloria is grappling with her own morality and stifled creativity and feeling her daughter slip away from her and looking back on those days of innocent joyful play and the thing is that it’s all so sweetly painfully joyously human that it changes Barbie.

There’s a maiden(s), mother(s), and crone(s) aspect at play, and Barbie is all three and none at all. She is Ruth’s daughter and she is at once old (64 this year) and young (a toy for children, sexless and innocent and optimistic). Sasha is her past and Gloria is her present and the old woman on the park bench, filled up with years and life and peace and joy, is her future.

Barbie chose to become human, but it was also never really a choice. You can’t un-know something, you can’t ever go backward, you can only go forward. Humans only have one ending. The only alternative to growing is dying. And death may be inevitable, but better later than sooner. The child must become the adult. The adult must become the elder. The elder must eventually die. And living all those years is a gift even when it’s painful and Barbie embraces it.

worst part about getting angry is how much it makes you want to be mean

Hunger Games didn’t really eat holes in my brain the way that it did for some other people but god the opening lines. The opening lines. Katniss wakes up in bed and immediately, instinctively reaches beside her, only to find the bed empty and cold. Before we even know her name – before we know literally anything about her or this world or her place in that world – we know that she loves someone. We know that she is reaching for where Prim should be, sleeping safe and warm beside her, but Prim is not there. She is not there, and her half of the bed is cold and empty. People talk about characters being “doomed by the narrative” when most of the time the character was literally just a well-foreshadowed death, but Prim WAS doomed by the narrative. It’s the very first thing we learned. It’s the most key, integral, important piece of information we’re given about everything that is about to happen: Every single choice Katniss makes is to protect her little sister, and it isn’t enough. In the end, Prim still dies. Prim was dead before the story even started. Katniss, reaching. Prim’s side of the bed was cold and empty. There is no version of this story where Prim could have been saved. Katniss, reaching. The very first thing she does in the series. She wakes, and she reaches, but Prim is already gone. THAT is how you do Doomed By The Narrative. Edit: Also it is key that there was literally nothing Katniss could have done differently. If she had not acted to save Prim, Prim would not have survived the Hunger Games. But by acting to save Prim, Katniss accidentally kicked off an entire rebellion and ultimately massively increased the amount of danger Prim was actually in. The key is that this is irrelevant. If Katniss had done literally anything differently, Prim still would have died. If Katniss had faltered or changed course at any point, Prim still would have died. There was never a point where Katniss could have changed Prim’s fate. There’s no version of this story where Prim lives to see the end of it. She’s dead before the story begins. That’s doomed by the narrative.

Taylor Byas, from I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times: Poems; “The Therapist Asks Me, “What Are You Afraid Of?””

[Text ID: “The remembering hurt / more than the living because shame dials / in. You hearing me? I was naive enough / to think I could control a life. Even mine.”]

I’m so tired of hot actors with no actual talent or magnetism. we need more ugly little cuntservers giving performances that fuck so hard you leave the theatre with road rash. willem dafoe if you’re out there

my look today is inspired by sleep deprivation and anxiety

there’s something really special about the way that, during barbie’s breakdown, gloria comforts her with (loosely paraphrased), “it kills me that someone as beautiful and smart as you feels this way”

and the point, of course, is that stereotypical barbie and stereotypical ken have both suffered under the constraints of their titles, that neither have ever had any room for self-actualisation as dolls, but barbie is surrounded by powerful women. doctors, physicists, presidents, judges. amazing women who—unlike barbie—hold massive amounts of power and influence in barbieland outside of just being barbie. stereotypical barbie goes through her arc asking questions and believing that everyone else around her is more qualified, more intelligent, more capable, more-whatever than her, despite the surface thesis of her story being that she has to confront the inequalities still faced by girls and women in the real world. even in barbieland, this utopia for women, barbie herself does not feel on par with her other aspects

because even the narrator pauses the action for a second to acknowledge that, yeah, margot robbie is fucking gorgeous, and any situation where she’s saying she isn’t pretty is objectively wrong. but the narrator doesn’t stop to say, “hey, stereotypical barbie, you don’t have to be called anything special to also be intelligent and creative and worthwhile,” because despite the utopian ideals of feminine power, stereotypical barbie is still regarded as the blonde bimbo who has to rely on others to tell her what to do, even if it’s meant kindly

but gloria, who she’s deeply connected to, whose emotions and fears barbie has taken on, who feels inadequate and small in her own life, looks at stereotypical barbie—before barbie became the doctor or president or construction worker or anything other than a pretty girl in a swimsuit—and says, “how brilliant you are, already, all on your own, without any special titles at all,” knowing that the changes that she needs to go through at the end of her story aren’t to make her smarter or more capable, but simply for her to find her own place