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Recently, I decided to watch the movie Chances Are and realized, quite suddenly, that there was a span of roughly 9 years where we loved movies about reincarnation. At first, I thought maybe it was just a coincidence, but then I started to look into it, and from the late ’80s to the new millennium, there are roughly 5, if not more, movies all around the idea of coming back to life and finding your love.
It isn’t a rare idea; there are plenty of films across the board with this idea, but focusing, especially, on Chances Are, Switch, and Jack Frost, there was a very distinct feel to the idea of reincarnation in that time period that feels both extremely weird and also horribly terrifying? What’s even worse is that I maybe think it’s charming?
Going in order of release, let’s first focus on Chances Are, a movie where Louie Jeffries (Christopher McDonald) dies and wants to get back to Corinne Jeffries (Cybil Shepherd) and their unborn child. He decides to just jump into the closest baby that’s about to be born, named Alex Finch, and gives his soul to a new life. The problem is that he doesn’t have the necessary shot to make him forget his old life, so when he ends up in his old house, all his memories flood to him, and he and Corinne fall back in love.
The problem is that he also kisses his daughter, Miranda (Mary Stuart Masterson), while being Alex Finch (Robert Downey Jr.) before getting his memories back, and so the whole movie is a back and forth between his old life with Corinne as Louie and Alex falling in love with Miranda. The greater point of most of these films is about growth and moving on, but what is specifically interesting about Chances Are is that Corinne realizes she’s been in love with their friend Philip Train (Ryan O’Neal) all this time, and she marries him, but even after Alex gets his “shot” from the angel and forgets his life as Louie, both Philip and Corinne are okay with him being in love with Miranda, even though they remember? Anyway, I really liked this movie so what does that say about me?
Another movie I loved as a kid and didn’t realize was problematic until I got older was the 1991 movie Switch. Starring Ellen Barkin and Jimmy Smits, the movie focuses on Steve Brooks (Perry King), who dies and is going to go to Hell but gets a second chance at life. The goal is to go back to Earth and find one woman who loves him and doesn’t hate him and his misogynistic ways, but what he doesn’t know is that he’s being sent back as a woman. Amanda Brooks (Ellen Barkin) has all the same memories as Steve and the same tendencies, but has to find a woman to love her as a woman.
Finding Steve’s friend Walter Stone (Jimmy Smits), she tells him of her task, and throughout the movie, the two end up falling in love and having a baby together. Luckily, the baby is a daughter, and so, in the end, the woman who loved Steve Brooks unconditionally was his own daughter with his best friend. So, to be fair, when you write the movie out like this, it just sounds like the kind of movie your parents would watch whenever it was on TV and not realize how messed up it really was.
And finally, the movie that warped so many of my generation’s minds and how we view death: Jack Frost. Remember when Michael Keaton wanted to be back with his son Charlie, and so he came back as a snowman for one Christmas? Because I sure do! A movie that forever made “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac the saddest song in the world, Jack Frost is basically one father’s hope to spend one last moment with his kid.
If you want to terrify your children, just put this movie on! It shows a talking snowman that is in no way as comforting as Frosty.
To be fair, I remember loving Jack Frost as a kid, even though it was 1998 and I was barely 7 and barely had a concept of death to begin with. But I do remember crying over “Landslide.” That I’ll never forget. Basically, the story is this: Jack (Michael Keaton) dies in a car accident on his way back from a show that his son, Charlie, didn’t want him to go on.
To help both Charlie and his mother (Kelly Preston) cope, Jack comes back in the form of a snowman, and they spend the holidays together in a way that Charlie never really got to with his father. A sad lesson about living life to the fullest while we can, the movie, yet again, is about coping with death and how we all struggle to move on. I’m just baffled parents let us watch this, because truly, I think I might have nightmares of Michael Keaton as a snowman.
Look, I think the fact of the matter is that we like thinking that when we die, we can come back, but right before Y2K, we really wanted to believe in reincarnation, and I have to respect that.
(image: TriStar Pictures)
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Recently, I decided to watch the movie Chances Are and realized, quite suddenly, that there was a span of roughly 9 years where we loved movies about reincarnation. At first, I thought maybe it was just a coincidence, but then I started to look into it, and from the late ’80s to the new millennium, there are roughly 5, if not more, movies all around the idea of coming back to life and finding your love.
It isn’t a rare idea; there are plenty of films across the board with this idea, but focusing, especially, on Chances Are, Switch, and Jack Frost, there was a very distinct feel to the idea of reincarnation in that time period that feels both extremely weird and also horribly terrifying? What’s even worse is that I maybe think it’s charming?
Going in order of release, let’s first focus on Chances Are, a movie where Louie Jeffries (Christopher McDonald) dies and wants to get back to Corinne Jeffries (Cybil Shepherd) and their unborn child. He decides to just jump into the closest baby that’s about to be born, named Alex Finch, and gives his soul to a new life. The problem is that he doesn’t have the necessary shot to make him forget his old life, so when he ends up in his old house, all his memories flood to him, and he and Corinne fall back in love.
The problem is that he also kisses his daughter, Miranda (Mary Stuart Masterson), while being Alex Finch (Robert Downey Jr.) before getting his memories back, and so the whole movie is a back and forth between his old life with Corinne as Louie and Alex falling in love with Miranda. The greater point of most of these films is about growth and moving on, but what is specifically interesting about Chances Are is that Corinne realizes she’s been in love with their friend Philip Train (Ryan O’Neal) all this time, and she marries him, but even after Alex gets his “shot” from the angel and forgets his life as Louie, both Philip and Corinne are okay with him being in love with Miranda, even though they remember? Anyway, I really liked this movie so what does that say about me?
Another movie I loved as a kid and didn’t realize was problematic until I got older was the 1991 movie Switch. Starring Ellen Barkin and Jimmy Smits, the movie focuses on Steve Brooks (Perry King), who dies and is going to go to Hell but gets a second chance at life. The goal is to go back to Earth and find one woman who loves him and doesn’t hate him and his misogynistic ways, but what he doesn’t know is that he’s being sent back as a woman. Amanda Brooks (Ellen Barkin) has all the same memories as Steve and the same tendencies, but has to find a woman to love her as a woman.
Finding Steve’s friend Walter Stone (Jimmy Smits), she tells him of her task, and throughout the movie, the two end up falling in love and having a baby together. Luckily, the baby is a daughter, and so, in the end, the woman who loved Steve Brooks unconditionally was his own daughter with his best friend. So, to be fair, when you write the movie out like this, it just sounds like the kind of movie your parents would watch whenever it was on TV and not realize how messed up it really was.
And finally, the movie that warped so many of my generation’s minds and how we view death: Jack Frost. Remember when Michael Keaton wanted to be back with his son Charlie, and so he came back as a snowman for one Christmas? Because I sure do! A movie that forever made “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac the saddest song in the world, Jack Frost is basically one father’s hope to spend one last moment with his kid.
If you want to terrify your children, just put this movie on! It shows a talking snowman that is in no way as comforting as Frosty.
To be fair, I remember loving Jack Frost as a kid, even though it was 1998 and I was barely 7 and barely had a concept of death to begin with. But I do remember crying over “Landslide.” That I’ll never forget. Basically, the story is this: Jack (Michael Keaton) dies in a car accident on his way back from a show that his son, Charlie, didn’t want him to go on.
To help both Charlie and his mother (Kelly Preston) cope, Jack comes back in the form of a snowman, and they spend the holidays together in a way that Charlie never really got to with his father. A sad lesson about living life to the fullest while we can, the movie, yet again, is about coping with death and how we all struggle to move on. I’m just baffled parents let us watch this, because truly, I think I might have nightmares of Michael Keaton as a snowman.
Look, I think the fact of the matter is that we like thinking that when we die, we can come back, but right before Y2K, we really wanted to believe in reincarnation, and I have to respect that.
(image: TriStar Pictures)
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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
Source: Scott Dudelson / Getty
Sadly, sexual abuse of children is all too common. And while some of us conceptualize it for what it is, for men, with the way sex is seen as some type of rite of passage or something they are supposed to desire from a woman, without exception, the lines get blurred.
You’ll often hear men describing predatory, molestation or rape encounters with older women as “losing their virginity” or the beginning of their sexual experience. But in actuality, it’s the violation of a trusting child.
Recently, 28-year-old rapper Da Baby appeared on Angela Yee’s podcast Lip Service. At the very top of the interview, Yee and her co-hosts, Lore’l and GiGi Maguire, spoke about losing their virginity to a woman. GiGi shared that she hunched another girl until the both of them climaxed. While the hosts argued about whether or not that constituted losing one’s virginity, Da Baby shared that he had done something similar, much earlier.
Da Baby: “If that’s losing your virginity. Then I lost my virginity at four/five years old…Never mind I ain’t gon’ speak on it. But like, I got two older brothers. So all the older n*ggas from the neighborhood, they used to come to the crib. My momma worked two jobs. She wouldn’t even be home. Me and my brothers would come straight home from school. We little ass boys. And there was this little girl, not a little girl, they was grown. My brother was a kid. My oldest brother was a kid. So I’m a kid kid. I’m like five years old. And in there doing whatever they was doing. And I was copying off them n*ggas: Humping on her leg, sucking on her titties, that type of sh*t at five years old. B*tch R-Kelly’d me when I think about it. She was grown. They look like they were grown. Like 17-18. My first time sharing that on camera. But yeah, I wouldn’t call that losing my virginity.
I ain’t know what I was doing then. I knew more than the average five-year-old.”
They gloss over this particular story relatively quickly but you can watch the full interview in the video below.
Source: ljubaphoto / Getty
Why do I feel like singlehood is more common among powerful women than among powerful men? I know so many women who are kicking a** out there in their careers, but seem to struggle to maintain a relationship. Meanwhile, most of the highly successful men I know are married or in long-term relationships. But, if I can be honest, the powerful men I know in stable relationships are in relationships with women who either A) don’t work or B) work jobs that they don’t really care about/don’t require much of their time and attention.
My dad is one such a man. He openly admits that he doesn’t want his partner to work. “I work very hard all day and when I get home I want my partner to be there to have dinner with me and spend time with me. I don’t want her out, working.” How do you feel about that sentiment? I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, it’s not like anyone is forcing my dad’s partner to be with him. She knows the arrangement and the expectations. But isolating the question of whether or not she is happy and putting that aside, what do we think of the man who wants that arrangement? Sexist? Controlling? Endearingly old-school? Relatable? It is a mixed bag, isn’t it?
You might think that my dad’s sentiments are just those of an old man who isn’t used to an age in which women work. But that’s not true. I actually know many men my age who’d prefer a partner who just complimented their careers rather than had her own. And then I know men who say they don’t relate to that at all, love that their partners work, but then…when their partners really hit it big time…show their true feelings. And they’re a bit different. Is it possible that your partner can’t handle you being in the spotlight? Maintaining a relationship while working towards your goals is hard enough, and once you’ve attained them, the struggle may not be over.
Source: kupicoo / Getty
He wants regular family dinners
Whether or not you have children (family dinner could just mean you, him, and your dog), he’s very concerned with whether or not you’ll be home for dinner. He asks if you can get out of what you’re doing early, in order to be home for dinner. Should he wait for you to eat? Well how long should he wait? When will you know if you can be back. He’s really clinging onto this nuclear family image of a couple who eats at 6pm sharp together every night.