We watched a few flashback movies this week, and this was the one we watched right after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I thought it was quite comparable to Ferris Bueller, but for some reason, Carolyn disagreed.
Carolyn’s thinking was more along the lines that this movie was alright, but that not much happened plotwise. “It wasn’t particularly hilarious… It was decent, though.”
Basically, it was about one year in high school. It follows kids around from the first day of school through the last day of school/graduation dance. You have the hot senior who struggles with finding a good job, you have his sophomore sister struggling to lose her virginity, you have her friend who is dating an older guy, you have the guy who likes the sophomore but is too shy to make a move, you have his best friend who ends up sleeping with the sophomore, and then you have a stoner surfer dude who is barely related to the rest of the cast but is just thrown in so you can have a stoner surfer dude. And the hardass teacher who just wants to get his class to learn American History, but thinks everyone is on dope.
There were conflicts (losing virginity, dealing with jerks who don’t call after you put out, other jerks who desert you when you need them, best friends sleeping with the girl you like, abortion, getting the girl, etc).
From the director of Clueless, and the writer of Vanilla Sky & Singles. David Lynch was the studio-chosen director, but he didn’t want to do a comedy.
With Sean Penn (Milk, 21 Grams), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Weeds, Road To Perdition, eXistenZ, The Hudsucker Proxy, Single White Female), Judge Reinhold (Stripes, Gremlins, Swing Vote, Arrested Development, he’the Honorable Judge Reinhold in both Arrested Development and Clerks:TAS), Robert Romanus (hey, he was his character from this movie, “Mike Damone”, in one episode of Family Guy! Other than that, he was in American Pie 7: The Book Of Love). Mr. Hand went on to be the only actor to reprise his role in the short-lived 7-episode “Fast Times” TV series.
AND NIC CAGE! NIC CAGE’S FIRST-EVER MOVIE! He has no speaking lines (except in the TV-only version) and is on-screen for only a few seconds. He is credited as Nicolas Coppola.
3 of the actors won Oscars for Best Actor in later movies.
Bonus points for featuring a copy of Artchur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End book, 14 clips of old-school videogames, and epilogues for the main characters’ ultimate fate after the movie ended. Unlike Carolyn, I think this was a great stoner high school comedy.
I rated this a bit lower than Carolyn… Maybe it didn’t live up to my hyped up expectations. That is the problem with going back and watching old things. Nostalgia causes us to remember things as being better than they really were.
But this was still awesome. I had totally forgotten the context of “Bueller? Bueller?”. And knowing the principal in the movie has now been arrested for child porn kind of adds an interesting flavor to his acting. This movie is an undeniable classic. It still holds up. Not so much of a party movie, but the execution of everything unfolding works out well.
Kid decides to skip school with his best friend and his girlfriend and have a Ferrari-ride caper around the city, while dodging his parents and principal. Sort of a predecessor to Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (there was an actual Ferris Bueller show that didn’t do as well as Parker Lewis Can’t Lose…. because the fact of the matter was that Parker Lewis was a better Ferris Bueller than the Ferris Bueller they had for the TV series.)
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck as the tightly-wound hypochondriac best friend (Star Trek 7, Speed, I Love You Beth Cooper, Twister, The Edge, eps of Mad About You, principal in The Happening); Mia Sara as the girlfriend (Harley Quinn from Birds Of Prey, Timecop); Ben Stein (famous role for him), Jeffrey Jones as the principal (Sleepy Hollow, 4 eps of Invader Zim, Justice League, Beetlejuice, The Devil’s Advocate), Jennifer Grey as the sister (Dirty Dancing, Red Dawn), Cindy Pickett as the mom (Sex And Death 101 — also as someone’s mother), Lyman Ward as the dad (Not Another Teen Movie), Edie McClurg as the principal’s secretary (Wreck-It Ralph, The Life & Times Of Tim, and of course, she was Mrs. Poole from Valerie/Valerie’s Family/The Hogans), and also a bit part from Charlie Sheen. I totally didn’t see Louie Anderson (Life With Louie), but he was in there too. I also didn’t notice Kristy Swanson (Buffy The Vampire Slayer [the movie], Hot Shots, 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag, Dude, Where’s My Car?)
“To produce the desired drugged-out effect for his role as the drug addict in the police station, Charlie Sheen stayed awake for more than 48 hours before the scene was shot.” Staying up for 48 hours and playing druggies is a gateway drug to being Charlie Sheen…
Cindy Pickett and Lyman Ward, who played Ferris’s parents, married in real life after filming this movie. Awwwww.
Jeremy Turn3r: “It’s funny how, aside from this movie, Broderick has mostly made a career out of playing guileless, wide-eyed doofuses. Yet in this movie he’s motherfucking Machiavelli.”
Sheer Panic: “Ferris Bueller will always be a 10/10 for me.”
Soundwav: “I once read a comparison of FBDO to fight club that was amazing. That ferris only existed as a fantastical figment of an awkward boys mind to cope with an overbearing father and a lack of friends. I’d post a link if I wasn’t afk and hammered.”
T-minus 5 🖐️days to what I consider to be the most important surgery of my life, my FFS. 👷♂️➡️👷♀️
There’s other surgeries, but this is ***The*** One 1️⃣️, for me.
It’s also the most expensive out of all of them, at $30K. 🔪🌍💵💵💵💵💵3️⃣️0️⃣️0️⃣️0️⃣️0️⃣️🤑🤑😭😭
SRS:🔪🍆 I mean, I still don’t know if I’m ever gonna get SRS/GCS (“sex change”). I’m open to the idea and will undergo necessary preparations*** to do so, but I don’t have any explicit plans to do that, as my genitals don’t give me any dysphoria, as I’ve always known that “Some Women Have Penises…Get Over It”. This is covered 100% by Carolyn’s insurance, and is covered in a lot of places. Anti-discrimination clauses got this one covered way before anything else. Possibly a $0-5K surgery,
BA: 🍅🍅 Breast augmentation is a near-100% thing with trans women. But that surgery is also pretty cheap due to how common it is due to cis women getting it. It’s less than a car. And it’s increasingly covered by insurance, as well. It’s just not a huge deal compared to face. $5-15K.
VFS: 🙅♀️🗣️ Voice feminization surgery ($10K) is a pretty big deal, especially having to have the self control to not speak, cough, or clear your throat for a month afterwards — which would ruin the surgery and cause you to have wasted $10,000 on nothing. Besides my lifelong throat-clearing problem…. I’ve done so well in speech therapy — with my pitch higher 📈 than many cis women [my last cis-woman date asked me how to get her voice like mine!] — that surgery seems unnecessary.
BFS: 🤸♀️⛹️♀️🙋♀️ That really just leaves body feminization surgery. That’s an arena that could end up costing as much as my face, in aggregate. Butt implants (~$10K), hip implants (~$15K), liposuctions (~$8K)… all fall under this category. This category could end up being more than my face 😪😰🤬. But you don’t do it all at the same time, usually. (if you do butt+hips, you have to sleep on your stomach for 3 months, fuck that).
But I also have a pretty damn good body 👅👩🎤💋. I’m completely and utterly satisfied with my body as a human body — I consider myself a “sexy rectangle” 💋💟🚺. I’ve gotten dates with a cis-woman who simply noticed me in public and struck up a conversation with me and later admitted it was because they were checkin’ out my bod 👩❤️👩💪💅👅. People simply aren’t harsh to me in public. Ever. It never happens. Old people laughed at me once in 2017, before public misgendering permanently stopped — I haven’t been called “sir” in public in over 6 months, and not even on the phone in months.
But admittedly, I’d fucking kill for those gorgeous feminine curves (like what Carolyn & Beth have), and I really want my body to have those kinds of curves, too, to really feel like “me”.
So I mean… This Is The Big One. 💥1️⃣️💥 This is the one I will put the most research, effort, and money 📉 into. It’s also the one that has the worst recovery – shit like wearing a nose 👃👃 guard for 4 months until my follow-up appointment in New York City 🗽 or London (which itself will add another $2K to the costs, probably!).
Sure would be nice if ANY of this was covered. 😤🤦♀️👎 FFS coverage is only just now starting to roll out, as anti-LGBT medical discrimination statutes are just starting to be applied to FFS, thanks to peoples’ legal challenges. ✊✊✊ I’d be covered if I worked at Starbucks ☕, but not if I worked in my actual career field (or what’s left of it). But since I waited decades, and my former cis(ha!)-het(ha!)-white-male(ha!) privilege 🤑🤭 did afford me a certain financial empowerment ✊ to where I can just do this in 2018, rather than play legal games for a year or 2. And honestly, my contributions simply set the stage for Carolyn’s contributions to be “spare cash” instead of “needed cash”. It’s really Carolyn who is making all of this possible, at this point. She works so hard. I don’t. She is so, so, so, so, so unimaginably strong in this regard. She’s the man! 👩🚒💪👩❤️👩 She’s the one who’s dealt with this dumpster-fire 🔥 of a human being as her spouse for decades. And not to diminish Beth’s role: I also couldn’t have done this without her support and guidance, either. I love you both sooo fucking much!😍😘👩👧👧👩❤️💋👩👩❤️💋👩
So anyway… T-minus 5 days, and I’m pretty fuckin’ stoked about all of this. 😍😅👩💻🧚♂️👠💄😊
Y’all won’t be seeing me for a bit afterwards, except for gory pix on FB. 😷🤕🤢😭🤤🙅♀️🛌 I’m not going to RambleGrue ⛺🌌🎭, I’m not going to Constellation ⛺🌌🌠, I’m not going to any more pool parties 👙💦, I won’t be going somewhere crowded like Risque at The Crucible 😥🤬. Nothing where my face might get bumped, or where I don’t end up at home at the end of the night ☹️. I won’t be giving oral sex 🦄😮🍆😸 to either sex for a couple months (😭). I won’t be drinking 🍹 or smoking 🔥 again until September 29th — but I’ll be eating plenty of edibles, I’m sure.
Y’all probably will think I look weird and fake afterwards, and probably won’t like my new face as much as the one you are familiar with. 😥 And that’s kind of the expected result. This isn’t about you. It’s about me. 😘🙋♀️🤸♀️ And it’s about the people who haven’t met me yet, and about the strangers who see me on the street and in the public. And about future co-workers. Etc etc.
Swelling will take 3-6 mos to go down; nose 👃👃 will take 1-2 yrs to settle; hairline damage will take a year to grow over. The FULL recovery for this 6.5hrs of surgery will be slower than most recoveries from most surgeries are. 🛌🛌🛌🤕🤕. My calendar will be FULL of post-surgical care for months 🤬🤧🗓️📆. I’m supposed to not go in the sun without sunscreen 🌅🌇☀️, basically until 2019. (and i NEVER wear sunscreen, not even if i’m sitting on the beach 🏖️ for 4 hours, not even if i’m camping for a week.. so this will be a HARD habit for me).
And to those of you who don’t think the new me looks weird or different — You might fall into the category of people who don’t even see the difference. And then think, “What was the point of all that money and effort?” 🤔 … When people who get FFS don’t tell their co-workers, their co-workers tend to think they “got a different haircut” or “look different” or “had something done” without knowing what it was.
There are a LOT of people (especially cis females, and bisexual people) who simply don’t perceive 👁️👨🔧👩🔧🕵️♂️ the differences between male vs female facial structure — and those people might not even notice the difference that much 🤔.
Except for the nose 👃👃👃. Noses say a lot. My nose change will probably be obvious to everybody. Hoping for as little MichaelJacksonism as possible *nervous laughter* 😅😅
So anyway…. I’ll share some before-after pix from the clinic 🌏👨⚕️🔪 i am going to, in the comments.
Cheers! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤
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FOOTNOTES:
***[[[ thousands of dollars of genital 🍆⚡⚡🔥electrolysis (which electrologists always mark up 50% compared to facial electrolysis — which seems exploitative 🤬), tons of doctor research, years-long wait lists, etc. ]]]
This is the last remaining Gregg Araki movie that we had not seen, which I am still able to obtain. I still can’t get a hold of “The Long Weekend (O’Despair) (1989)” and “Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987)”. So we’ve seen 8 out of 10 [not counting his MTV pilot as a movie].
Unfortunately, this early Araki work is lacking the directorial, surreal/psychedelic flair that he developed later on in his career. Visual-wise, it’s not as “fun” as his later work. However, bonus points for a 3 KMFDM songs and a Chemlab song.
I think maybe he realized his movies were too dark, brooding, and dare I say boring — so he threw in a lot of quirkiness to lighten the load a little bit. A little sugar to coat the bitter pill. And it works. He’s become one of my top 15 directors, and my favorite gay director (though I find his sexuality irrelevant, it does explain the gay focus of many of his movies).
These early movies are some of the bleakest, most nihilistic, despair-ridden shit I’ve ever seen.
Plotwise, an HIV+ gay guy meets another HIV+ gay drifter homeless guy who ends up getting into some trouble. So the homeless guy convinces the somewhat tame guy to go on the run together.
You’d think with being on the run, that something would happen. No. Not much really happens. This story isn’t even really about the journey. There’s just not much that happens. I fell asleep repeatedly because it was some of the most boring shit I’ve ever seen.
The tame gay guy had a female best friend, who worried about him, and as a result, she ignored/was bitchy with her boyfriend and his needs. I guess if tame guy wasn’t gay, then they’d be a couple, so she probably took it hard because of that… But she’s barely in any scenes, so no…. There’s no romantic angle with her. There’s really not much to this movie besides nihilistic despair.
I’d recommend this for Gregg Araki completists only. Proceed with extreme caution.
Castwise, none of the actors are really in anything significant, EXCEPT Daisy of “Fern & Daisy”, who’s been in a LOT of movies. I still don’t remember her. And the “Twist Master” was in a lot of stuff too. But yea. For the most part, this movie is lacking any significant cast.
