Ah, memories.

I didn't see the TV Glow and thus my life is doomed.

This extraordinary film does indeed have the power to save lives, and I reckon the sticky, unwashed floors of many an American Cineplex are presently littered with furiously shattered egg shells.

"Trans film has existed for a long, long time before this moment and will continue to exist after this moment." All I want in life post-transition is to make a significant contribution to the movement and help continue pushing trans film forward/ever higher in the cultural stratosphere.

Cinema is a cemetery

A vital, powerful film. About feeling trapped - within our own sense of misplaced self, and within the confines of who we are told we are. It toys with nostalgia, revels in genre, and boasts loudly that music and media can allow us to escape personal prisons

I cant wait to rewatch and write more about it and talk about it with others. Every movie has the power to change lives. This one has the power to save some.

From an interview on BW/DR:

QuoteI know I'm not the only one kind of observing what a time it is for three really special trans movies: Stress Positions, The People's Joker, as well as TV Glow. The through line I see is parodying what it's like to be alive. Do you see commonality in these films, if you have seen them? Is there something special about the way trans people see the world?

Um yes, definitely. There is something special about how trans people see the world.

I talk a lot about my love of this very specific genre of "European auteur makes a film about America." Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) or Antonioni making Zabriskie Point (1970). Or the Baudrillard book America where he's just on a road trip through the desert shit-talking America for what's beautiful and grotesque about it. My gaze is certainly informed by my outsider status as a trans person. I can see the cracks and the simulacra in a way that does have to do with the othering distance of queerness and transness. I think that is reflected in the film. There are books to be written about the trans gaze in cinema that is now just getting to be codified. I have seen both Stress Positions (2024) and The People's Joker (2022) and really dug both films. I especially think Vera [Drew]'s desire to destroy corporate IP, subvert it, transition it, mutate it, and pervert a film very close to my heart is very close to my trans heart.

But also three films by three white trans girls does not a trend make. I'm very skeptical of any narratives that say the moment has arrived, because we're all in danger and representation unto itself is not something to overinvest emotionally in. Trans film has existed for a long, long time before this moment and will continue to exist after this moment. Perhaps at this moment, there is some kind of fledgling, bubbling-up into a commercial space rather than a DIY or art space or a T4T space. But I think that it's quite nascent.

The commodification of transness into an entertainment industrial complex as emotionally and morally and capitalistically bankrupt as our current space is, is not necessarily something to celebrate unequivocally. I think it's something to tread very lightly into as we hopefully continue to do the work as a community of understanding transness as not an identitarian-based apolitical group. But in fact, as a political and ideological movement that is inherently oppositional to the binary, conservative stranglehold that cis straight white supremacist patriarchy has over all of our lives.

International distribution outside of the States has been locked in:

Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis has sold to key independent buyers in Europe's top five territories, we can reveal.[url]

QuoteAhead of its anticipated world premiere at this week's Cannes Film Festival the movie has sold to Constantin Film for Germany and all German-speaking territories, including Switzerland and Austria; Eagle Pictures for Italy; Tripictures for Spain; and Entertainment Film Distributors Limited for the U.K. A deal with Le Pacte for France was announced last week.

The movie debuts on Thursday 16th in Cannes with cast Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, D.B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman set to tread the red carpet.