💥 Trainwreck Gloria Tesch / Sofia Nova - Author of the Maradonia series turned Republithot

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millais said:
As a young man, Gunter/Gerry started off in West Germany as a youth preacher, spreading the gospel via guitar and song, making bank by selling records of his Christian music and religious pamphlets. Some of his old songs can still be found on Youtube.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bgDTux1yUA0
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After immigrating to the US, he attended a Christian diploma mill university where he got an unaccredited doctorate in some kind of theology thing. Before marrying Marina, the mail order Russian bride, he opened a few Christian publishing companies and bookstores in Florida, which was his main scam for a long time, soliciting donations and investors while producing little but missionary pamphlets/videos and self-published junk from him and his group of cronies. After the Christian publishing circles in Florida figured out his scam, he was ostracized from the business, losing much of his revenue, and it was either during or after that period that he started a more dangerous scam: real estate fraud. To delay foreclosure of their properties, Gunter and Marina kept flipping ownership of their properties back and forth between the two of them to stay one step ahead of the bank, and this got them into big legal trouble around the time of their divorce (which I believe was due to Gunter's domestic abuse of Marina, though money/legal trouble certainly could have been a part of it).

Simultaneous to the legal trouble with the the fraud and the collapse of his Christian publishing company scams, Gunter sunk much of his remaining money into the production of Gloria's music videos and especially the Maradonia film, which was why Gunter was so desperate to find distributors at the trade show in California where the screener of the film was obtained and finally shared here. Right now Gunter is no longer living with Marina and Gloria. I think the real estate case is still in the court system, but the divorce is for sure done.
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This is quite depressing
 
Venus said:
This is quite depressing
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He's a professional grifter and scammer, so don't feel too bad for him. Even worse that he tries to hide his unethical practices behind a fig leaf of religion.
 
Barbarella said:
I should try again with friends and alcohol but without the backstory for them, I'm guessing something would be missing, and I would get death stares for the screening.
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The issue with watching Maradonia is that the film itself does such a poor job of explaining anything that you'd need someone with knowledge of the books to take you through it to explain things. I think that people who have actually read the books have an appreciation for the film that others may not have.
 
millais said:
He's a professional grifter and scammer, so don't feel too bad for him. Even worse that he tries to hide his unethical practices behind a fig leaf of religion.
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Moreso feel kinda bad for Gloria more than anything.
 
That there are people here who actually read the whole books, or watched the whole move... I'm not sure whether to be impressed or disgusted.
 
Henry Bemis said:
Respectfully disagree; it's a trashy masterpiece.

However, it is a movie best reserved for a group setting, preferably a group that's a healthy mix of so-bad-it's-good aficionados and people who still have faith in basic tenets of cinema.
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I don't know if you can even rank Maradonia as so-bad-its-good.
I love a shit film and I wanted to love Maradonia, but there is nothing there to enjoy.
I feel like really good-bad movies occupy the uncanny valley between a "real" movie and some amateurish waste of everybody's time. Take the Room for example. It's the holy grail of bad movies. It's consistently technically inept without being actually unpleasant to watch. It feels like a "real" movie, just a strange one. Like it was made by an alien who'd only had limited human interaction. The bizarre dialogue is actually hilarious in parts, and its technical shortcomings add to the experience and make the story far more enjoyable than if it were made by a more competent director. Tommy Wiseau is profoundly retarded, but he seemed to care about the movie on some level.
Then you have Maradonia: There's nothing charming or endearing about the technical failures, they just make it difficult to watch. When you can hear the dialogue past the shitty audio mixing, it's all just repetitive, cliched nothing. The acting isn't even that wonderful exaggerated style of overacting that comes from B-movie stars who lack the self awareness to see how talentless they are. The cast of maradonia aren't even at an amateur level. Everything is a barely audible, flat monotone. The editing is so piss poor i'd be surprised if they even watched it back once before rendering.
Watching this movie adds nothing to our metatextual understanding of Gloria as a lolcow. It just takes something that we already accepted to be a pile of shite (the maradonia saga) and transposes it into another medium for absolutely no reason whatsoever. All we can glean from this movie is that her parents really are deluded crazy people. We already knew that. This movie just redundantly confirms the narcissism that their internet history had already long confirmed . You don't have to then watch the whole movie: just any random 30 seconds will be enough to prove that it is indeed an utterly meritless, piece of shit movie, and simply knowing of it's existence in relation to Gloria's backstory tells us more about her than could ever be gained from actually watching it.
 
r00 said:
I don't know if you can even rank Maradonia as so-bad-its-good.
I love a shit film and I wanted to love Maradonia, but there is nothing there to enjoy.
I feel like really good-bad movies occupy the uncanny valley between a "real" movie and some amateurish waste of everybody's time. Take the Room for example. It's the holy grail of bad movies. It's consistently technically inept without being actually unpleasant to watch. It feels like a "real" movie, just a strange one. Like it was made by an alien who'd only had limited human interaction. The bizarre dialogue is actually hilarious in parts, and its technical shortcomings add to the experience and make the story far more enjoyable than if it were made by a more competent director. Tommy Wiseau is profoundly exceptional, but he seemed to care about the movie on some level.
Then you have Maradonia: There's nothing charming or endearing about the technical failures, they just make it difficult to watch. When you can hear the dialogue past the shitty audio mixing, it's all just repetitive, cliched nothing. The acting isn't even that wonderful exaggerated style of overacting that comes from B-movie stars who lack the self awareness to see how talentless they are. The cast of maradonia aren't even at an amateur level. Everything is a barely audible, flat monotone. The editing is so piss poor i'd be surprised if they even watched it back once before rendering.
Watching this movie adds nothing to our metatextual understanding of Gloria as a lolcow. It just takes something that we already accepted to be a pile of shite (the maradonia saga) and transposes it into another medium for absolutely no reason whatsoever. All we can glean from this movie is that her parents really are deluded crazy people. We already knew that. This movie just redundantly confirms the narcissism that their internet history had already long confirmed . You don't have to then watch the whole movie: just any random 30 seconds will be enough to prove that it is indeed an utterly meritless, piece of shit movie, and simply knowing of it's existence in relation to Gloria's backstory tells us more about her than could ever be gained from actually watching it.
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Yeah, you can tell The Room was Tommy Wiseau's opus. Johnny is clearly a self insert in the semi autobiographical story of the woman he loved who cheated on him with his friend, and his resulting cynical view of a world where you can't trust anyone.

With Maradonia, you can tell it was a cash grab. There's no passion in it. Gloria doesn't care about Maya. Most of the story is a Narnia ripoff. She wrote it for a school project and her scammer father forced her to continue it and star in a movie version because he thought he could make a profit. Now that he's out of her life she never even talks about it anymore.
 
r00 said:
I don't know if you can even rank Maradonia as so-bad-its-good.
I love a shit film and I wanted to love Maradonia, but there is nothing there to enjoy.
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Respectfully disagree.

For me, it is remarkable how they managed to take a book like Maradonia and the Seven Bridges (A book with a nonsensical plot) and somehow make it less coherent by removing most of the Seven Bridges.

Furthermore, there are so many little things that make the film so much more enjoyable. Like the fact that Epstein reads his script from his lap during the opening scenes, and the camera slowly zooms in to hide it after about ten seconds. Or the Green Screen at the end of the film. It's a bad film, sure, but its not an uninteresting film.

But maybe I'm just generous and easily amused lol.
 
The main issue with the "movie" is that it went in with an optimistic goal of making a fantasy film on a small budget.

Fantasy films are by no means cheap to make. Narnia cost around $30 million, the Harry Potter movies each cost an average between $20-40 million, Hunger Games I think was around $35 million and Lord of the Rings was $50 million (disclaimer: these are all rough estimates, will edit this later to verify information). These intense budgets were put in place to cover the cost of paying actors (because you need to be able to not only provide costumes, but you need to feed them as well), cost of paying people to design/implement special effects, pay people to set up scenery, pay for marketing, ect. That's only the tip of the iceberg.

It was pretty clear to me that the actors were only reading lines, because Gerry had already by that point bitten off more than he could chew. He didn't have a vision as to how the movie would turn out and seemed to lack the self awareness to realize that the script he was working with was shit. I'm certain that if he hired a competent script writer (or a competent writer in general) he could've had a half decent script to work with.

A competent script writer knows that every scene needs to have a reason to be there- and that conflicts within a film should be resolved within a reasonable degree so that the transition throughout the film isn't wonky. Take the scene after Joey pushes Maya into the pool: there is no real conclusion as it just makes an awkward transition into the scene with Mr Perkins. We cut off at the part where Maya storms away from Joey after a somewhat heated argument about why she won't lie to their parents. We don't get to see how her mother reacts to the situtation nor do we really get any kind of hint as to whether or not Joey got berated. Instead, we cut to the next day and are told about the Pebble beach with Mr Perkins. In summary, you can't just jump from one scene to the next without some kind of transition. Even Tommy Wiseau understood that scenes need to have some kind of transition in between.

Back to the budget, there's a reason why a lot of Hollywood studios prefer to make Urban fantasy films: there'd be no hassle to build any kind of fictional village or town just to film a few short scenes, you rent buildings instead. You can set things in modern times, which really helps on saving money that can go towards other necessities for the movie budget.

$300,000 (if that's what they really spent on this film) isn't nearly enough to cover the cost of just special effects alone. It's not even enough to pay the actors for their time.

TL;DR: Fantasy films are expensive as fuck.
 
Vicious.ink3 said:
I read the first book (original 800 pages, before it was sliced into two books) from cover to soulless, insipid cover, but never got to the next installments. I have, however, seen the film four times and the only enjoyable part is in one scene when Gloria - sorry, Maya - loses her necklace and freaks out and the kid who plays Joey is just done. It was the only part of the movie that produced genuine laughter.
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What about 'TASTE OUR POWAHS!'?
 
Vicious.ink3 said:
I think that has become a strangely iconic scene (insofar as any film seen by about fifteen people can have an iconic scene) but what I really enjoyed about the part I mentioned was that the guy playing Joey had clearly just had too many hours wandering around the Florida outback with Gloria tesch and I honestly have no idea if that part was scripted or if Gloria actually did lose her necklace and Michael Rodriguez had just had enough.
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I really liked the part where Herr Tesch decided to film his daughter topless for no reason. Dude's a creep.
 
Vicious.ink3 said:
I think that has become a strangely iconic scene (insofar as any film seen by about fifteen people can have an iconic scene) but what I really enjoyed about the part I mentioned was that the guy playing Joey had clearly just had too many hours wandering around the Florida outback with Gloria tesch and I honestly have no idea if that part was scripted or if Gloria actually did lose her necklace and Michael Rodriguez had just had enough.
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It's definitely scripted. His reaction is his typical over the top acting style. It's also yet another a poorly written scene. How do you lose a necklace that big without noticing as it happens? I think it's supposed to be a one off gag, but she never mentioned anything about her necklace before that so there was no payoff.

MysticMisty said:
Didn't her mother take topless photos of Gloria on her 18th birthday? If they weren't topless they were still hyper sexualized. Both of them are fucked in the head.
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Yes, I posted them before so they're probably a few pages back.
 
Maradontia said:
Looks like she's married now. Still no likes or comments.

https://twitter.com/GloriaTesch/status/859572726893248512

Then you have this weird shit of Gloria retweeting a bunch of people all saying the same phrase to her in a cultlike manner.

https://twitter.com/SalesRemix/status/858518606119919616

https://twitter.com/SalesHustleTV/status/858707574484606977

https://twitter.com/CloseTheDealTV/status/858938646187180033

https://twitter.com/TheSalesProShow/status/859221964485005312
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I still say her Twitter/social media is run by her mother. None of that shit makes any goddamn sense, and reads like a 40 year old's version of hip youth culture. Isn't Glo's mum foreign? There's just something that screams "I don't understand this culture" in the posts.

The fuck does this even mean? It makes literally no sense in the context of twitter.
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The bit about the weather reminds me of her mother. Member when Mama Tesch sat and had a conversation with @Kenneth Erwin Engelhardt about the weather, in GloGlos facebook comments?
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And this shit reads 100% like a facebook-mother-meme
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EDIT: uhh, looked a little further into it - Does Glo even speak German? I've never seen her mention her German tongue but here is a status on her personal FB.
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Still convinced it's Mama Tesch tbh :lol:
 
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