people talk about this like it's a prestige movie. no: araki uses the budget jump to blow his blown-out compositions even further toward their bubblegum heaventrash zenith, on the perpetual verge of popping flat, oversaturating, leaving us with the timeghosts of these huge blaring empty televisual archetypes of Town and Family, Halloween and Christmas-- then-- then dissolving to the agony of Real. then the recoil. can’t look, can’t love too long. araki still has a raw nerve tuned to the…
kitty bobo fucking loves brainiac. he cannot get enough. he has listened to bonsai superstar upwards of 200 times but does not, in the year 2001, know that timmy taylor is dead. sometimes maggie puts on a luscious jackson record or whatever; he doesn't really get the appeal but will quite sincerely bob his head a little. 15 years later, she will be pridefully casting her presidential ballot for Hillary Rodham Clinton and he, having graduated from some kind of 12-step program, will be the world's coolest childless bisexual uncle.
so it's been a little over a decade since imogen binnie said that we need fewer stock trauma-porn bildungsromans about the agony and ecstacy of the transition process--that is, fewer stories like the people's joker--and more art about the messy stuff. her nevada isn't a perfect book, but it is an admirable attempt to grapple with what happens after the curtain closes on that boilerplate trans narrative-- all the weirdnesses and failings of human nature that transition can't fix. a…
when i walked into the theater, having been informed that it was sci-fi psychedelia in the vein of a fantastic planet or a belladonna of sadness, there were 2 things i wasn’t expecting:
1. this is apparently revisiting a project from the 1970s, but the vibes are so exquisitely 2006. like, “unironic comic sans in opening credits” 2006. there’s a surprising correspondence with a certain mostly forgotten aesthetic trend of the era, some kind of pastel indie baroque— flat colors…
