My memoir, cont’d - What Silver Linings Playbook gets terribly, horribly, irrevocably wrong about mental illness
This is the hell that is my life: I go to a movie to have a good time and end up seeing my life getting portrayed. This is a common experience for many people, only for me it often goes completely wrong. The message gets garbled and completely fucked up and I leave the theater with bitterness and regret.
This is a common experience with very bad movies, but then something like Silver Linings Playbook comes along, a very good movie that gets so close to the truth that it’s a complete and utter tragedy how wrong it is about everything.
[SPOILERS]
My father is an unmedicated Bipolar, just like Bradley Cooper’s character, Pat, is in SLP, you see. My mother, like Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Tiffany, is an undiagnosed Borderline Personality (that’s my diagnosis of her character; and no, I’m not a psychologist, I just lived with two BPDs in my life for 32 years). Unlike Pat and Tiffany, however, my father’s crazy was not the cure for for my mother’s crazy—which turns out to be the supposed moral of SLP. What this movie gets so terribly wrong is that two crazy people don’t make two sane people, they just make one big, crazy mess. Oh, also: mental illness is never fun, and never results in a happy ending for anybody.
If you haven’t seen ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’
Go! See it now! Even if you have to drive miles and miles.
Here’s a teaser from a friend:
“Before filming Beasts of the Southern Wild, the acclaimed Sundance hit now making its way through theaters nationwide, director Benh Zeitlin asked lead actress Quvenzhane Wallis how she might go about fixing a post-apocalyptic world. “Well, I would always brush my teeth,” Wallis, then five years old, responded. “I would listen to my parents.” Her words resonated with Zeitlin. “That became a real principle of the character [Hushpuppy],” he later told NPR. “That somehow you can restore order to the universe through your behavior.”
In other news… it hit a little too close to home for me, which is all you need to know about my childhood ;-).
The jewish barber’s speech from The Great Dictator (1940). A poor jewish barber looks just like the bad dictator and is mistaken for him. He uses his chance to deliver a speech to the people disguised as the Dictator. A speech of love and kindness.
Chaplin managed to create one of the most beautiful and epic speeches of all time in the end scene of The Great Dictator. This was also Chaplin’s first true talking picture and his best grossing film ever. This film and speech has also great significance because it was delivered just before the WW2 broke loose.
(via lonesome-hearted-lover)
Source: valley-of-the-dolls
Presenting Horrible Movie Clichés, an illustrated guide, brought to you by the New York International Latino Film Festival.
(via forgotten-van-buren)
Source: freshorphresh
SO IN THE COMICS she’s falling off a bridge and he catches her to try to save her with his spider web, but her body is forced into an unnatural position and she snaps her neck. And as he’s reeling her body back, he’s still making wise-cracks about how much he loves his powers at the moment, because he saved her. And then he realises that she’s dead.
welp
i quit life
My dad told me this on the way back from seeing the movie…..
well you know
I’m glad this doesn’t happen
S T O P.
(via allifearisoblivion)
Source: peetaslipsareturningblue
‘The suffering black male body and the threatened white female body’: ambiguous bodies in Candyman
[watched this for the first time last night… then found this article by googling “racism” and “candyman”]
Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) marks the introduction of an African-American monster to the horror mainstream. As well as combining a threatening physical presence and gruesome method of attack, Candyman (Tony Todd) seemingly offers an embodiment of divided racial stereotypes based on fears of miscegenation through his attention to the film’s blonde heroine Helen (Virginia Madsen). Elspeth Kydd maintains that ‘Candyman takes the fear of miscegenation to an extended monstrous form when the black male body becomes the grotesque site for the eruption of these racial/sexual fears and the white woman’s body the site where these fears are played out’.
: 'Django Unchained' looks awesome... And moviegoers continue to anger me.
I am beyond excited for ‘Django Unchained’! I’ve always loved westerns ever since I saw the Sergio Leone classics as a kid and Tarantino is one of those directors that you know won’t shy away from the brutality and harshness of the genre.
There’s an excellent cast attached to this movie…
Top 25 Sci-Fi Movies of All Time
[history will place Prometheus in this list as well… then they’ll see, then they’ll AAAAAAALLLLL see]
A future built on a science that allows men to play God. Their creation? An artificial intelligence more human than human, forced into slave labor and born with a ticking-clock expiration date. It is up to an ex-cop by the name of Deckard, an ex-Blade Runner, to put down the last of the Replicants.
The tagline “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream” defined the Alien film series, which owes its debt to Ridley Scott’s first movie that pit Warrant Officer Ripley against the acid-bleeding xenomorph. On the surface, Alien is a “monster in the house” creature feature, only the house is a spaceship and the monster is a mouth-tongue’d beastie that lays eggs and uses people’s chests as doors.
