watched a double bill of gregg araki’s “nowhere” and lifetime original movie “dying for the crown”, enjoyed both and feel like they have a connecting thread of wonderfully inane, disconnected dialogue. the former is kind of a liquid skies feeling thing about teens expressing themselves exclusively through nonsequitors while being stalked by an alien, the latter is a lifetime feeling thing about a rich suburban family expressing themselves mostly through nonsequitors while being stalked by… i’m sorry but i don’t think i can realistically describe this character using any words other than “evil milf”. like take a look at the picture below and see if you can guess who the villain is.
she looks like this for the whole thing and it becomes increasingly crazed feeling when like characters don’t notice her because she’s wearing sunglasses as a disguise or something as she glides behind them like an extra from The Eye Of Argon
anyway the backstory is that this lady was knocked off homecoming stage as a teen after an altercation with the protagonist and then became barren and dedicated her life to revenge. it has to be said that she was apparently also pretty supervillainy at the time of the original incident - when she hops on stage at the beginning she’s wearing an orchid bouquet specifically because she knows the homecoming king is allergic to them and will instantly fall over and need to be hospitalised. later on this plot thread will pay off when she locks him in a limo (later a cabinet) full of orchids to die.
in between she murders her husband at the start of the movie by hitting him over the head with a conch shell(?), seduces the heroine’s teen daughter away by offering college application advice and info on where to find good discount clothes, gets hired for and tries to destroy the heroine’s flower arrangement business, murders the previous flower store employee by tasering her in the ass, and has like, some kind of teenage boy crony to do her bidding like place fake flower arrangement orders on her behalf (asked what he should do with a truck full of roses: “find some girls to give em to… or guys.” “this weekend’s gonna rock” he replies enthusiastically. could definitely be an exchange from the former film.) oh and also whenever she has to pay for anything she pulls out a wad of cash from between her breasts and tells the recipient to “keep the change”. this happens twice at like a ten minute remove. the ending of the movie shows her in prison building a prom crown out of scrap metal pieces, wearing it, and then taking it off to stab it into the prison warden’s face.
in between she keeps notes on her scheming on a whiteboard
the moral of the movie is that even if you feel sorry for someone you shouldn’t do anything to help them because what if they’re a cartoonishly evil vamp lady trying to ruin your life? also it isn’t really related to anything but i’d be remiss not to mention that the daughter’s love interest is one of the most powerful 30-year-olds-playing-teenagers things i’ve seen in quite a while
my favourite scenes in nowhere were all the scenes of people hanging out in square empty rooms with huge portraits of themselves covering the walls but i also liked the bit where protagonist Dark introduced himself as “you know, like the absence of light”. uncannily good at capturing the aesthetic feeling of like the anti-drug teen psa dimension.
some of the lifetime movie shots are almost as disconcertingly artificial in their use of colour coordination
