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My esc headcanon

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Me trying to explain to my mother how "Rim Tim Tagi Dim" is not a stupid incoherent song, but a tragic story of young people from Balkan leaving their home countries disappointed and angry in systems that failed them, forced by the shitty conditions to leave the comfort of their homes and people they love. He even had to leave the cat, mom, the cat... Did she ever meow back?

#the way my serbian ass immediately related to that song

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This year just won't be the same when it comes to Eurovision

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israel has now officially been announced as one of the countries participating in eurovision 2024

meanwhile russia is still banned, for the third year in a row. the double standard is just sickening

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Eurovision is now lying about Israel and Russia. The Eurovision organiser EBU is suggesting Russia wasn’t banned due to invading Ukraine, a lie that even their own website disproves.

The EBU says the Israel situation is “fundamentally different” from Russia in 2022. They suggest they didn’t kick Russia out of Eurovision because they invaded Ukraine, they kicked Russia out of the EBU for unrelated reasons.

Except… that’s not what happened! In 2022, the EBU had announced Russia would be kicked out of Eurovision “in light of the unprecedented crisis in Ukraine”.  

The Russian broadcasters responded to being booted from Eurovision by announcing their intention to withdraw from the EBU, which the EBU reported via their website.

So why are they now saying something else happened? It’s a lie. The EBU kicked Russia out of Eurovision before the Russian broadcasters left the EBU. This is clearly an attempt to distance themselves from their (quite right) decision to remove a country from Eurovision.

But the fact is, the EBU created a precedent for themselves of removing a country due to war and now they want to pretend that never happened so they don’t have to take action against Israel. 

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minor barbie spoilers ahead!

my favourite detail in the movie is when barbie escapes the mattel building and jumps over the exit barrier with no hesitation- but the men get stuck because they don’t know how to get around a door that won’t open for them.

it’s such a small moment but it makes such a strong point. barbie has faced more obstacles in her few hours as a real woman than the men have faced in their lifetimes.

(not to mention that in the end, the door does open for the men anyway without them even trying- they were just doing it wrong)

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it's the way that I and probably every other woman could PHYSICALLY FEEL the uneasiness radiating off of Barbie when she and Ken first get to Venice Beach and everyone is staring and catcalling her

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i'm so fascinated by the "just ken." in the context of the tagline (she's everything, he's just ken) it makes it sound like ken is just an accessory to barbie and is nothing without her, but in the actual movie in the speech barbie gives, she turns the phrase on its head. ken isn't an accessory to barbie, he isn't the attention barbie gives him, he's just ken. and that's not even mentioning the "she's everything" part of the tagline and how it goes with gloria's speech of women having to fulfill the impossible task of fitting into every box and juggle conflicting expectations and roles just to be liked by society. the tagline represents opposite ends of a spectrum but by the end of the movie barbie and ken meet in the middle, where they're each allowed to be their own person independent of the expectations and insecurities they've been operating on. this movie, man

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The scene in the Barbie trailer when Barbie is skating around with Ken and asks "Why is everyone staring at me?"

THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE AN ADOLESCENT GIRL.

Living in Barbieland (childhood girlhood) but then suddenly you're all grown up in the real world subject to scrutiny and sexualisation (the guy slapping Barbie's ass) and feeling like existing is a crime?

Being forced by adult men into a box (which leads to the not like other girls syndrome) and exploring the 'real world' (being forced to grow up too quickly) while fighting the realisation that maybe the world sucks and being a woman is so difficult while hoping with all your heart that it's not always going to be this way.

Losing touch with the very things that made you happy because they're considered immature and girly? (The group of teens that said they hadn't played with Barbies since they were five.)

Older women telling you that you have to learn the truth about the world and that you can never have your old life back (Kate Mckinnon's Barbie) despite it being the only thing you yearn for, but also older women being a bright spot and support (the old woman on the bench) in the endless slough of life.

And this is just the trailer!!! I'm so excited for this movie I can't breathe, Greta Gerwig the woman that you are 😭

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And also the way Barbie and Ken are role playing heterosexuality without any inherent sexuality of their own, without any understanding of what it means, or even any genitals at all! Just pretty-girl + handsome-guy = obviously a couple. And the way it fucks them both up! Because they’re both stereotypes, neither of them is a specialist version, no brain surgery or pilots license or Nobel prize for either of them. They’re just assigned the roles of Every Man and Every Woman. And Ken ends up doing Way Too Much because he’s hanging his entire self-worth on being important to Barbie. And Barbie just isn’t interested in him, she was assigned a boyfriend she didn’t ask for and doesn’t want and doesn’t know what to do with, just because that’s what society expects of men and women, that they will necessarily couple up and fall in love because… that’s what they do. Regardless of any personal quality of either party.

It’s about heteronormativity and amatonormativity and the unrealistic expectations society sets boys and girls up for from infancy. Barbie and Ken are every pair of toddlers sharing a sandbox while the adults around them call them each other’s little “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” even though neither party understands or is capable of understanding the implied meaning of that. Or wants to.

It’s a literal funhouse mirror of that weird pressure put on kids to perform heterosexuality from an early age. It examines how that leaves us unprepared for the complicated reality of actual relationships even if it turns out that you are heterosexual and do want sex and romance. Boys and girls aren’t really allowed to be just kids on the same team, so they grow up into men and women who generally want very different things from each other and are trained to look for it in everybody because anybody is better than nobody, and try to force it to work.

Barbie and Ken letting each other go in the end was perfect. Barbie the Every Woman realizing that she doesn’t have to be special, she just has to be, and Ken the Every Man realizing he has to seek validation elsewhere and lean on his fellow Kens for emotional support, WHICH THEY GIVE.

Truly a movie of all time.

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The Barbie movie reminded me about how when I was little my parents were upset that I kept making my Barbie dolls kiss, so they bought me a Ken doll. The next day they found me having a funeral for poor Ken in the garden, he had died of tuberculosis. All the Barbies were in attendance and I buried him under our rose bush. The Barbies were too poor to afford a headstone (it was 1875) so I didn’t mark where the grave was and I never could find him again. He’s probably still there.

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the thing that gets me about about barbie is that barbie land wasn’t even purposefully a matriarchy, barbie land came about because of the way little girls were playing with their barbies, it wasn’t created by mattel it was created by the people using the toys, so the fact that the barbies ignored the ken’s and had girls night every night wasn’t because they had some bias against him, it was just an accurate depiction of how kids play with barbies. I had some ken dolls as a child and they were essential to the plot in the sense that of course my barbie has a boyfriend because that represented the world i saw around me, but also he didn’t have any purpose in my dream world because i was only interested in what the girls were doing because they represented me and how i wanted to be, I wanted girls night every night I wanted the girls to be president and austronauts and not because of some inherent feminist idea but because I was a girl and I wasn’t thinking about boys, ken was an accessory. this movie wasn’t made to change the world but it showed a different perspective than what we usually see which I thought was fun. Men don’t have to be the centre of all our stories and its not even because we hate them, sometimes we’re just not thinking about them

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💀💀💀

hello my name is patrick american’psycho pierce&pierce bateman and i kill people (that’s how i got my name). i have a 700 step skincare routine and a tanning bed in my house and a lot of people tell me i look like christian bale (AN: if you don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!!) im a yuppie but my teeth are straight and white. i have tan skin. im a businessman and i work at an office building where i’m a stockbroker (but i don’t really do anything) i’m rich (in case you couldn’t tell) and i love name brands and buy all my clothes from them. for example today i was wearing a lightweight linen suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt and a dotted silk tie all by valentino couture, and perforated cap toe shoes by allen edmonds. i was walking around outside the laundromat. it was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which i was very happy about. a lot of poor people stared at me. i put my middle finger up at them.

“hey halberstram!” shouted a voice. i looked up. it was…..paul allen!

#i am deceased #this post shines more light on the movie than any filmbro thinkpiece tho

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aspiring social media influencer patrick bateman watching the apology video his fellow influencer, paul allen, released after the members of their shared content house were cancelled for god-knows-what, and suddenly realizing his own apology video falls flat in comparison: look at that subtle victimization. the tasteful inclusion of his past traumas. oh my god, he even started crying.

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what I genuinely appreciate about American psycho as a movie and bale’s involvement is that mary harron (director) and Guinevere turner (writer along w harron) were the only ones who saw its true potential as a period satire horror with a feminist lens. given that both of them directed and wrote “i shot Andy Warhol” I think they were the only people who could have given proper depth to this movie as opposed to just botching it (in so many ways; lionsgate tried to botch it in SO MANY ways) or making a film that was uncritically devoted to gratuitous misogyny. and obviously as a critique of capitalism, with the understanding that Patrick bateman was a monster and the firm refusal to let him be interpreted in any capacity as redeemable.

Christian bale was the *only* actor that tried out for the role who also understood the character was an irredeemable monster and he had no interest in understanding bateman as anything other than an alien who got dropped into 1980s nyc as a businessman. everyone else lionsgate tried to have make the movie (actors directors and writers) wanted some psychological profile, explicit inclusion of context in the film for why bateman was like that (which would only serve to have the audience sympathize with him), or a jekyll and Hyde portrayal (to make him redeemable).

harron , turner, and bale knew that they were all missing the potential point completely, along with the fact that doing any of that would only make the film less interesting, and that all of those attempts to make bateman understood stemmed from everyone being extremely uncomfortable with the content of the film/book and the actors being uncomfortable/unable to play a character they couldn’t sympathize with. Ur literally not supposed to sympathize with him. It’s a horror in which the main character is the villain, but it’s also a social commentary/satire and surreal, which means the main character must also be a preposterous villain characterizing only the absolute extreme of what is being satirized, not a real human. he is one-dimensional on purpose and if he were not, it would undermine the entire message of the film.

I saw someone somewhere say that bateman was a portrayal of how if men had to have the mentality that women have, they would become homicidal maniacs. I think that is such an interesting and valid interpretation and we wouldn’t be able to view this movie thru that lens if this movie had been written and directed by anyone other than harron and turner. that specific layer of meaning would not exist, at least not effectively.

and also the writer of the book brett ellis whateverson (sorry I cant remember his name for the life of me even tho i know it?? Idk why) couldn’t have made it a good movie bc the book he wrote was an ode to graphically violent misogyny that he pretended was satire. Also his screenplay sucked because he kept the garbage parts, made it MORE graphically sexually violent, and apparently turned it into a musical and didn’t want to write one anyway or so he says (I think he did but when everyone agreed it sucked he pretended he made it suck on purpose). when harron and turner made it an ACTUAL satire and made the viewer incapable of taking Bateman seriously, the novelist hated it and insisted and continues to insist that it never needed to be made a movie. Probably because he’s pissed 2 women made it objectively a better story (and made Bateman laughable instead of like... cool)

unrelated but I also think it’s interesting that the film went through so many recasts but the one actor who got decided on from the start and never got switched out was jared leto

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people who haven't read the american psycho book are living half a life. they don't even know patrick bateman went to a u2 concert and had a spiritual experience locking eyes with bono, was fully convinced he was the devil and that the two of them communicated telepathically, and walked a way with an "aching erection"

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Anastasia (1997) deleted scene where the KGB tries to arrest dimitri for counterrevolutionary monarchist sentiment because he keeps referring to leningrad as st petersburg in public