David Hines Profile picture
Sep 13, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Watched STATE'S ATTORNEY (1932) based on the recommendation of @NitrateDiva and LORD ALMIGHTY JOHN BARRYMORE IS WILDING

Bachelor mob lawyer Barrymore defends hooker Helen Twelvetrees, shacks up with her, then switches to prosecutor and goes straight but keeps Twelvetrees

UNTIL
Barrymore's political ambitions put him in circles with society gal Lilian Ulrich, who tells him she had a serious relationship at nineteen, and when he asks how serious her response is to *whisper*

to which he replies, "That makes things much easier!"

cut to: a parked car
headlights pass as they sit up and she talks a drunk Barrymore into going to find a judge or the mayor and get married

which they do

Barrymore then goes to tell Twelvetrees and then elects to sleep it off at a bachelor hotel
a frustrated Ulrich can't get him out of the bachelor hotel so goes home...

...where she hooks up with his until-then competitor Raul Rollen, whose character is a celebrated Spanish tenor!
The tenor shows up at the hotel to announce he is here for his honor, and that he has been walking all night in the park

BARRYMORE. "...for your honor?"

that would be a 1932 joke about gay cruising
The tenor confesses that he loves Barrymore's wife and Barrymore agrees to an annulment -- he doesn't like divorce but annulment is fine! -- and he promises the tenor the wife is untouched

which, I guess is TECHNICALLY true

*as a wife* she is

EXCEPT ADULTEROUSLY BY THE TENOR
but it is WILD what pre-code movies could get away with

Barrymore *absolutely* banged this gal, but it was BEFORE they got married (by like twenty minutes), so it doesn't count and annulling the marriage is a-okay and still within 1932 standards
DIRECTOR. "Sure audiences will be okay with that?"
SCREENWRITER. "It'll be fine! Sure, the bluenoses'll kick, but what can they do?"
WILL H. HAYS.

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More from @hradzka

Feb 19
final verdict on TRUE DETECTIVE S4: just ok, a bit clunky, and the reveal doesn't work on a character level (ie, motivations don't make sense bc ppl's actions require access to information they have no reason to be privy to)

so it got me thinking: what makes TRUE DETECTIVE work?
on my recent TRUE DETECTIVE rewatch I started making notes about what I felt the essence of TRUE DETECTIVE was and what made it work

not a formula, but a vibe and ground rules that I would look to if for some reason HBO asked me of all people to create a season of TRUE DETECTIVE
or, put another way: of the stuff that made TRUE DETECTIVE: S1 compelling TV, what can you replicate without making it feel like a retread?
Read 16 tweets
Feb 9
reminder that when the Gaetz venmo scandal was wall to wall journos were swearing the guy who got arrested would imminently drop indisputable proof that Gaetz was banging a minor

that dude never dropped it, couldn’t deliver Gaetz to prosecutors, and went to prison
I think it’s fair to say that everybody on both sides of the aisle was prepared to believe Gaetz did sleazy stuff, but wanted to see the goods

and the goods never dropped when they could have saved an involved party from prison, so I expect this is bs
Read 4 tweets
Sep 25, 2023
here is an amazing anecdote I heard from somebody who has been in Cameroon

it is about money

or rather, the lack of it
petty corruption is *extremely* common in Cameroon; if you are a foreigner (or of a different local ethnicity than the officer) cops will straight-up demand a bribe to let you move on

in US currency:
typical sidewalk bribe: $3.50
typical speeding ticket bribe: $20
the government is doing a poor job of rooting this out, in part because they are all too busy collecting bribes

so busy, in fact, they have neglected a different and more hilarious problem

an extreme lack of small change
Read 12 tweets
Sep 4, 2023
yes, I know, it's deeply annoying that that the most dedicated people reporting on the white nationalist scene aren't honest brokers

but this flip side take is pure cope, folks

I wasn't going to do a thread on these guys, but fine, here we go
the media using these goons as a club to hammer normal righties does not mean that that is their most important function as far as they (the goons) are concerned

do not mistake what concerns you for the function; this ain't about you
rule of thumb when you're looking at radical groups is: figure out which groups in question you're dealing with, and here you're dealing with a couple different but aligned ones

they're called a) Blood Tribe and b) Goyim Defense League
Read 18 tweets
Aug 21, 2023
My brain has needed a break lately so my bedtime reading book of the last couple of nights was Peter Benchley's JAWS and it made me realize some new things about movie adaptations of books

I better understand Benchley's grumbles about the changes and why they were made
there are some famous changes made from book to screen in JAWS but the root of them is a change nobody talks about: genre

probably because JAWS (the novel) is a genre that really doesn't exist anymore; I'm not sure it was even named but I call it "the way-it-works novel"
the way-it-works novel is best understood as a forerunner of the technothriller

a technothriller (type specimen: THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER) explains the ins-and-outs of a world unfamiliar to the reader and sets an adventure there

the way-it-works explains the *familiar*
Read 30 tweets
Jun 8, 2023
My favorite horror movie is David Cronenberg’s version of THE FLY (1986), about which I could talk for weeks.

One of the most striking features of the film is how it perfectly paces its escalation. Tracking down the script made me realize just how carefully this was dialled in.
For those who haven’t seen: teleporter inventor Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) falls in love w/ Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), journalist documenting his work — but unknowingly teleports himself at the same time as a housefly, beginning a terrifying physical & mental metamorphosis.
Not the sort of thing you think about de-escalating — but Cronenberg did!

(He's still Cronenberg, though, so oh yeah this thread has some gore.)
Read 36 tweets

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