Billy Elliot

shoutout to the love of my life my best friend olivia for facetiming me last night and putting me onto this. i love you.  my love of the northern english will truly never waver. jesus. my god. a beautiful story of class and gender and family all wrapped up in a beautiful, fun, and visually appealing bow. jamie bell you truly never fail to astound me even today (coming from a serial rocketman rewatcher) but good LORD. it’s rare you get such a candid performance from a child actor and jamie i swear to you if i’d been a member of the academy in 2001 (or 2019 for that matter) you would not have gone home empty handed. male leads of all of us strangers going three for three on oscars snubs and i will have it no longer! god. it really does make you think. what a story of hope. when i say art prevails, i do always mean it because this story and movie itself are proof of art prevailing even in the darkest of conditions. when tony and the dad hugged at the mines i almost died. fainted dead on the spot. billy elliot reminds me of the beatles because they too were poor northerners who weren’t looking very good in living moms per capita. i’m listening to abbey road as i write this, because, and believe it, i saw so much baby paul mccartney that my beatles spidey senses turned on and my hands levitated towards my abbey road record like billys in the opening scene of this movie.  also, mythical soundtrack. the english stay winning (from a dirty, dirty american). this soundtrack placed me distinctly in the northern part of england from every single guitar riff to every single beating drum. london calling needle drop had me dancing around on my couch like billy in his audition! five stars! lastly, i’d like to think that elton john (who would later go on to write the music for the musical adaptation of this movie) saw baby jamie bell in 2000 and schemed on him to play bernie taupin for the next twenty years. elton loved this movie so much he bestowed upon jamie bell the great honor of playing his counterpart in the 2019 telling of the (second) greatest musical collaboration of all time. second only to lennon/mccartney. paul mccartney (fellow northerner to our darling billy elliot) to be played by jamie bell co-star in both all of us strangers and oscar’s snubbery paul mescal? coincidence? i think not. it’s all connected. anyways. elton john loves jamie bell just as much as we do and the academy doesn’t. what a sacred honor to dance like a black swan and to have elton john personally monitoring you to play his best friend for two decades. does it work like that? no, not really. but do i believe elton john is a sentimental bastard? of course.  (i’m not going to point out how it features best friends named william and michael. i’m not going to do that. because i have moved on and such references don’t even occur to me anymore.)  #longlivejaupin