best of the WORST films according to this Wikipedia listicle

...And 50s/60s. He was also great in From Here To Eternity (1954), The Birdman of Alcatraz (1963), and The Leopard (1963)

xxxp I would love to see Last Summer, but it is not available right now

Agreed.

beamish13 otm about Lancaster. A fascinating, conflicted guy, equipped with a superior intelligence. He loved Lampedusa's novel so much that he handed out inscribed copies to friends for years. I can think of few American movie stars with his beauty who accepted the toll of age and chose roles late in life without vanity.

ok i'm not gonna watch _myra breckenridge_ but i _am_ going to watch youtuber evasive getting a bunch of trans women at her house with bagel bites and making _them_ watch _myra breckenridge_.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spzGWwxY9rM

ok she "attempts to introduce femdom into the curriculum"? honestly, i would do this, BECAUSE GODDAMN WE NEED SOME FUCKING DOMINANT TRANS WOMEN OUT THERE, everybody wants to be a puppygirl these days

Kate I think you’d love that film tbh

There may be an argument on behalf of Mae West's appearances in Myra and Sextette being filed under theoretical dominant trans readings

Kate I think you’d love that film tbh

― frociaggine e figaggine (flamboyant goon tie included)

idk the bit where breckinridge rapes a dude for ten minutes straight might be a little much for me. i got a hard time with cinematic depictions of sexual assault.

There may be an argument on behalf of Mae West's appearances in Myra and Sextette being filed under theoretical dominant trans readings

― Rich E. (Eric H.)

see i see mae west as being camp as hell but not _trans_ particularly

well, more than that... i'm an older queer femme who's trying to figure out how to express my sexuality, and whatever that might look like, it doesn't look anything like mae west. to be clear i haven't seen _myra breckenridge_ or _sextette_ but her performance in both of them seem like mae west being mae west, and it's impossible to _not_ know what mae west is about.

i just don't perform dominance in the way west does. everything she says is a _suggestive double entendre_. and then myra breckinridge rapes a dude for ten minutes straight. she's not there for that, of course, because she's too fragile and threatened to be in the same room as raquel welch. that's the thing... it's hard for me to read west as an older woman confident in her sexuality. easier for me to read her as a woman who's over the hill right now and looking for love.

when it comes to art i do tend to engage with it paratextually. mostly i think this is because i am a Highly Sensitive Person and engaging with stuff directly tends to fuck me up emotionally. i do prefer paratext, mediated secondary sources. particularly i don't like engaging with art by myself, that _really_ fucks me up. fictional stuff, i usually only watch that around other people. idk, eric, you keep on top of this stuff, let me know if there's a local showing of myra breckinridge. i bet someone would show it here if they had a print. apparently church of film is showing a japanese movie called "bye bye love" tonight. i might check that one out.

reading trans representation in older media is difficult. most trans readings of media are either imposing trans narratives on media that isn't intentionally trans or else in some sense subverting the intended message. the interesting thing for me is that evasive says that the rape scene comes directly from the book, but i don't know if the _intent_ is the same. the context. per evasive, both vidal and sarne, the film's director, say that the film was one of those adaptations that's _against_ the source material. i am very fond of this idea, that of a film that's directly hostile to its source material. the most obvious example i can think of is "starship troopers". in this case, though, sarne's intent is apparently patriarchal and cishet - from what i can tell the redeeming feature of the film is its fundamental incoherence.

which yeah is my thing. i do prefer films to be narratively incoherent.

-

ok, here's the best case i can make for that rape scene. again, not having seen the film, talking about it entirely _in theory_

the most powerful queer act is that of _queering_. it is fundamentally a transgressive act however one does it, because being queer is _not normal_ under patriarchy. there's this very powerful cishet fear of being "turned" queer, of being "made" queer. however tempting that fantasy is to me, it doesn't actually work like that. i can't turn someone queer any more than decades of cishet propaganda could turn me straight. it made me very miserable for a very long time, it taught me to hate myself, but it didn't turn me straight. "queering", to me, is a type of deprogramming. i feel like a lot of people have the _potential_ to be queer, and "queering" is the act of making implicit queerness explicit. that's at the heart of a lot of camp, i think, why camp is such a strongly queer practice. "hey, have you ever considered that batman and robin are maybe kind of gay?" that kind of thing. this is easier to do with works that don't have a strong and compelling textual narrative - if i'm gripped by the story a piece of media is _trying_ to tell, i'm not going to take time to stop and wonder if it might actually be gay.

a big part of the transfem narrative is that for a lot of people their gateway to gender exploration is something called "force fem", which falls under the category of "consensual non-consent". and nominally this sort of thing reinforces patriarchal norms that see womanhood as being inferior or degrading. by giving people experiences outside of the realm of what's acceptable under patriarchy, though, it can open the door to challenge those patriarchal norms.

so something can, in one way, be a powerful means of deconstructing the ways individuals have been affected by patriarchal oppression, and in another way be really traumatic and really fuck someone up. i didn't ever do force fem myself, but i have been traumatized in my own ways by the ways in which i tried to come to terms with my gender identity and am still trying to come to terms with whatever the fuck my sexuality is.

i somehow doubt that this is what sarne is trying to express with that scene, but my understanding is that sarne's attempt to express anything at all in that film perhaps opens up the film to alternate readings.

i kinda want to turn this into an essay at some point and tie it in with some other stuff i've been working through but my level of functioning isn't quite up to that right now, oh well

There may be an argument on behalf of Mae West's appearances in Myra and Sextette being filed under theoretical dominant trans readings

― Rich E. (Eric H.), Wednesday, June 5, 2024 9:49 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

There may be an argument on behalf of Mae West's entire career being filed under theoretical dominant trans readings. Which might be overly reductive. That said, I do see her as an extreme branch of mainstream 20th century entertainment that connects her to more underground performers like Dwight Fiske or Ray/Rae Bourbon (he may not have been literally transgender, but he made a career of it).

(Disclaimer: I haven't seen Sextette and have only seen a YouTube supercut of West's scenes in MB.)

"has ANYBODY seen the Uma Thurman Avengers?"

I actually went to see this at the cinema when it came out. The film was terrible but it had a fairly extensive advertising campaign based almost entirely around Uma Thurman in a leather catsuit. This was a period when I went to see pretty much every major or minor action blockbuster. I learn from the internet that it was released on 14 August 1998, and looking at the UK box-office that week I recognise Armageddon, Lost in Space, and Godzilla, which I also went to see at the cinema. I had such refined taste back then. Where did it go wrong.

You really can't appreciate how much The Matrix felt like a breath of fresh air compared to the shower of crap that came before it.

I saw each of those films once at the cinema and never again. I've never revisited them. What do I remember about The Avengers? There's a point where Mrs Peel uses a code phrase - "how now brown cow" - in a telephone box, but the film didn't explain how she knew the code. I vaguely remember that the plot was about weather satellites. And I had almost completely forgotten that Sean Connery was the villain. Does he say "now is the winter of our discontent" at some point?

I wonder if that film had a second life as raw material for fake Kingsman / James Bond trailers. Given the fact it had Ralph Fiennes in a suit. I also learn from the internet that Ralph Fiennes is related to a man called Hero Beauregard Faulkner Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes Tiffin, an actual real man who really exists.

I still think about Ronin every so often. That film was a couple of years ahead of its time. Many years from now I'll be able to explain to the few survivors of the apocalypse that Jean Reno existed and was a thing. This has nothing to do with The Avengers, I just thought about it.