Saw this ad at Salon. I like Laura Dern, so I may have to figure out how to operate the DVR thingamabob to record this.
I know I’m supposed to find the character of Pepper Potts in Iron Man offensive and sexist. As the main female character in the movie, she’s, well, a servant. From one perspective, she’s like a fantasy wife-for-hire—hot, devoted, thoughtful, and submissive. She never brings the coffee cold and relieves Tony Stark from his duties for running the dull, domestic parts of his life, freeing him up to conquer the world. But I liked Pepper a lot. She was smart, wry, and professional, and her attraction to Tony seems to be a result of her being a workaholic, and she snaps out of it at the end of the movie. She’s brave and clever under fire. But I was ashamed to put it that way, because none of that really addressed the fact that she’s still a personal assistant.
And then I read this thread, where a discussion about whether or not Pepper is negatively portrayed as materialist hinged on her purchase of an evening gown with Tony’s money for her birthday. I actually thought the dress incident had nothing to do with materialism, and Pepper’s choices were cast in a flattering light. I’d say the dress incident in the movie has two plot functions: to show that Pepper has really good taste like she always said (we usually see her wearing all black) and to show that she has this whole inner life that Tony wasn’t aware of. There was no intention to shame the character for materialism.
I don’t know if I can really pull through to be super-blogger tonight. I just had my mind blown by a summer blockbuster, which is not something that happens to me very much. But Iron Man? Dude, I am ashamed to say this, but I’m probably going to be one of those people who goes to see the action movie again within a week of seeing it the first time.
Oh man, the more I hear about this movie Expelled, the funnier it gets.
The producers of “Expelled” spent two years interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers, and public leaders, including University of Minnesota biology professor P.Z. Myers, who does not support alternative theories of evolution. The clip of “Imagine,” which is audible for approximately 15 seconds, is used in a segment of the documentary in which the film’s narrator and author Ben Stein comments on statements made by Myers and others about the place of religion. In the documentary Stein says: “Dr. Myers would like you to think that he’s being original but he’s merely lifting a page out of John Lennon’s songbook.” This is followed by an audio clip of Lennon’s song “Imagine,” specifically, the lyrics “Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.”
That wingnuts have held a grudge against that song for 37 years tells you how small their world really is. Did they really think the plebes could be sheltered from doubt in god if that damn former Beatle hadn’t penetrated the Berlin wall of religious censorship? Or do they really think John Lennon invented atheism?
The more I hear about this movie, the more clear it becomes that it’s patched together using email forwards.
A clip from my latest obsession.
SPOILAGE.
Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts? The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, and that women are therefore a niche market that only needs a couple of intelligence-insulting bones thrown for a twice-annual girl’s night out.* But TV is another story. For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much. And TV meets a variety of entertainment gaps that weren’t being filled. You have your fantasies of female empowerment that still aren’t realized in the everyday world—like on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and you have shows that address women’s lives in an honest way, patriarchal warts and all, like on the comedy “Ugly Betty” and the drama “Mad Men”, which is a show that we power-chugged last week, watching most of the first season flying to and from New York.
The first season of “Mad Men” is set in 1960, which means it’s an exceedingly relevant program for modern times, because it’s this turning point in time that all culture war madness turns off of. When conservatives talk bitterly about the 60s, it’s because they romanticize the 50s as the ultimate moment of the American patriarchy, and to varying degrees, also the last gasp of blatant white supremacy, a utopia of white male dominance that was cruelly snatched away and needs to be restored through government intervention.
Two points of exposure to the widespread stoner masculine culture this weekend: Watching Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay and watching some folks play the new Grand Theft Auto, which is based on a fakey version of New York City. It’s probably kind of hard to define the stoner masculine culture, and not everyone who enjoys its products are stoners or even men, but it’s something you know when you see it. It’s products that are designed with this widespread audience in mind: Young men who bask in modern bachelor culture, with heavy doses of porn and marijuana smoking, usually to a soundtrack of alternative rock and hip hop. To say this is not to diss it—this particular cultural strain has many positive values that lead to all sorts of excellent entertainments. There’s a hefty sense of humor and an anarchic spirit that has given us many wonderful things, from video games for adults to the Gen X comedy stylings of everyone from the South Park guys to Mike Judge. It’s a culture that’s become so ubiquitous that many of the things that have spawned from it have only marginal relationships to their origins. Video games for grown-ups have grown so popular that you don’t even think of stoner culture when you think of a game like, say, my obsession Rock Band. Irreverent Gen X comedy has become disassociated from this culture, to the degree that shows like “The Daily Show” can exist without much reference to their “South Park” forebears.
Thanks to Roy for paying attention to Lileks’ continuing mental degradation. Roy wisely realizes that Lileks really is the true representation of the asshole who leans conservative, kind of hates himself for it because even he can tells he’s something of an asshole, and then doubles up the grumping in an effort to drown out the voices inside telling him that it doesn’t have to be this way. Or that’s what I’m telling myself is his disfunction this week.
Anyway, there are few things worse than when Lileks thinks he’s being clever, except of course that it’s also slightly awesome because it gives you a glimpse into the mind of someone who devotes 75% of his waking hours to rationalization. This review of “There Will Be Blood” tells us much about the mindset of a conservative who has replaced grumping with actual thought.
It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let’s just not tell ourselves that it’s a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we?
Oooooh, insightful. Next he’ll be complaining that lovers in movies look starry-eyed, or that death causes the characters grief. Perhaps the rich in movies are portrayed as nasty and insular for a good reason? Hell, Lileks isn’t even rich, but being comfortably middle class has turned him into a person that hunkers down in his home, fearful that post-modernists and hippies are going to kick in his door for an interracial love-in. There are a few rich people who are good and kind, of course, but movies talk either in characters or symbols, and since “There Will Be Blood” was a film heavy with symbolism, it would have been, what’s the word?—moronic for the character that symbolized wealthy capitalists to be anything but power-hungry and crazy.
Look, mega-wealth is irrational, and yet it’s the source of 95% of the political problems we have nowadays. It doesn’t make sense that people who have enough money to live in the lap of luxury should want more all the time, and should do everything to cut taxes and cut corners and tweak the market to get rich quick and cut corners to the tune of something like the Enron scandal. And that’s what they do. The logic of mega-wealth is the sort of thing that only springs from nastiness and insularity, a total lack of perspective.
He served as president of the National Rifle Association. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. He won an Oscar for his role as Ben-Hur in 1959, but Charlton Heston will probably be remembered by most for his bombastic, fabulously over-the-top performance as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. He died today at 84.
Heston’s family said in a statement that the actor famed for his heroic roles and portrayal of historical figures ranging from Moses to Michelangelo died Saturday with his wife of 64 years, Lydia, by his side.My favorite Heston films, you know, the kind of flicks you pass by when flipping channels and you’ll watch it no matter what point it is in the movie — Planet of the Apes (1968) and Soylent Green (1973).The actor, an outspoken liberal Democrat during the 1960s who later attracted controversy for his unapologetic support of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and conservative causes, had been battling Alzheimer’s.
As president of the NRA he achieved notoriety in 2000 when declaring at the organisation’s convention that his guns would have to be taken away “from my cold, dead hands.”
After the jump, the infamous story about the homoerotic subtext hidden from Heston in Ben-Hur.
(more…)
Thers has a great time mocking Ann Althouse and her commenters who are defensively railing against the idea that they have to see a movie before really registering a learned opinion of it, especially if there’s a strong possibility of encountering liberal values or arguments that must be avoided like the plague, lest they take hold. This comment was, as Thers said, the sort of thing that is so entertaining that you can while away time waiting in line at the grocery store or post office just standing there, rolling it over and over in your head.
How do you know about something you haven’t seen… Easy. By reading about it in greater depth than you’re capable of analyzing by sitting there being spoon fed. I didn’t see Fahrenheit 911 because I didn’t care to contribute to Moore’s wealth while exposing myself to wretch inducing propaganda, and yet I’m capable of discussing the film scene for scene and pointing out every single deceit therein beginning with the switcheroo in scene 1. To an extent you/they lack the patience to endure. That’s how.
So, I promised a review of Be Kind Rewind if it was a good movie, and I’m sorry to report that I just don’t think it was. In fact, the more I think about the movie, the more it irritates me. And while the audience we were out to see it with were trying very hard to like it, there was a palpable disappointment hanging over everything at the end. People had a lot more fun watching the submissions for the filmmaking contest the Alamo Drafthouse had before the movie came out, where people were asked to make 5 minute versions of favorite old movies of theirs. We laughed the hardest at the one I’ve posted above, which had the sort of cheery nostalgia mixed with mockery of its chosen movie that we wanted to see the movie tackle.
Instead, we got a treacly retread of the worst elements of cliched 80s movies. I mean, given that the subject matter of the movie was basically nostalgia, there’s a place to invoke all these 80s cliches, but it was done in a way that made it clear that the director seemed to sincerely think that there was a place for overuse of montages and worse, not just one scene that invokes what might be the worst 80s cliche of all time, which was marvelously parodied in this video.
Usually on movie reviews, I go with a still shot illustration, but with a review of “Persepolis”, I’m going with the trailer, because it’s important to see how the artwork of the book really is beautifully translated to the screen. This trailer barely gets at how innovative and interesting a job the artists did at really breathing life into the already strangely lively art of the comics. It’s a real shame that this movie will probably lose to “Ratatouille” for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, because while the art in “Ratatouille” was, as usual with Pixar, gorgeous, intricate, and top-notch, in this movie it’s just inspired. The art in the comic books draws heavily on the Persian tradition, and the movie takes it a step further, blowing up the heavy blocky art mixed in with touches of swooping, graceful lines and making it really breathe. It’s hard to imagine such a stylized movie that’s mostly black and white can be so warm and human, but there it is. They really did a fantastic job of remaking the books for the big screen.
Last night I saw the 3rd of the Best Picture nominees that I’ve seen, and probably the last of the front runners. (I just don’t think that Michael Clayton or Atonement were buzz-worthy enough to get into the running, but I’ll probably check Entertainment Weekly’s annual Oscar odds anyway.) Juno is probably out of the three, so that leaves No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. My money, for what it’s worth, is on the former, because it’ll seem like the Coen brothers’ time, and after watching There Will Be Blood, which I saw last night, you get the strong impression that Paul Thomas Anderson will be getting better with time, and have a lot more chances. Ont he surface, the two front-runners look remarkably alike. They’re both set in the beautifully desolate deserts of the Western U.S., and they’re both about degraded humanity. Both made me defensive about the mountainous desert area of the country I grew up in, which is not as depicted in the movies, a bloodless symbol of decay. Only 3/4 of the time. Except Phoenix, which is all the time.
But beyond the surface, these movies are wildly different. The Coen brothers decided to tackle the overlarge themes and insane levels of violence by dwelling on ambiguity, and the movie ends up being more about itself than directly about the themes tackled.* It’s unsettling and unsatisfactory, and put off much of the audience. When I saw No Country, the audience sat in silence for like a minute after it was over, and then the grumbling started. I’ll say now what I said then—people like their post-modernism delivered in the form of comedy.
In contrast, there was applause and a visceral excitement at the end of There Will Be Blood. The movie is based on the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair, which probably influenced Anderson’s choice to just make his movie a straightforward fable of American capitalism, a la Citizen Kane. Faced with the problem of wanting to tell a straightforward fable in an era that’s suspicious of such things, Anderson chooses to add weight to each anvil, making everything so over-the-top that it can be read as sufficiently meta. It’s a hard trick to pull, and I’d be skeptical if you could do it right before I saw it, but damn, he pulls it off. The only anvil that gave me pause was a shot of Day-Lewis, covered in oil, staring at an oil fire and looking like a demon. But it fit an overall commitment to over-the-top storytelling that manages to work. I’m still trying to figure out how he pulled it off.
There are two flavors of the patriarchal view of female sexuality, which I’d deem the “masculine” and the “feminine”, or at least the “controlling” and the “tragic” views. The former is the one that rises to the top in most anti-choice materials, particularly of the abstinence-only education sort, though they do try to soft-pedal it, mostly by changing the word “punishment” to “consequences” in materials meant for the non-fundie eye. If I were to describe it, I’d say the masculine philosophy of female sexuality is, “God gave women a virginity as a treat for their husbands, properly selected as their fathers, so that these husbands can get the thrill out of symbolically dominating you through blood and pain on your wedding night. If you deprive your husband and master of this right by having sex before marriage, god will punish you with STDs or unwanted pregnancy.” I call it the masculine view, because it’s the view that puts men at the center of it, and its about their rights and their domination, and it’s unforgiving to women. But a lot of women have this take on it—look at pretty much any conservative female writer or official face of an anti-choice organization (women hate women, too, so it’s not sexist! is the message there).
The feminine take is mostly a reaction to the punishing attitude of the masculine take. It’s a way to understand the injustice that is the punishing attitude towards female sexuality by displacing responsibility from the men who get a rise out of dominating women onto god and nature, and make it seem like female suffering is just a woman’s lot in life. This soft-pedaling comes mainly from women trying to make nice with the patriarchy. It kind of goes like, “Women’s lot in life is to suffer. Blame Eve, or accept that god made it so out of necessity and wishes that it could be another way. But in order to remind us daily of our submission and gratitude towards our male masters, our sexuality is about suffering. Virginity loss, pregnancy, menstruation—all pain and misery, how can you deny it? Sex itself is the tragedy of a woman’s life. You have to do it in order to fill your role and please your master, and maybe you can eventually come around to getting the joy that is the joy of a job well done.” Sex is constructed as worship, but of male power more than god, and the pain and sacrifice is part of the display of lowliness that allows you to approach the holy.
I finally managed to see “Juno” in enough time to write this reply to publius’s naive suggestion that the movie be a model for anti-choicers, which is to say quit trying to ban abortion and just try to talk people out of it. In other words, be one of the many flavors of pro-choice. Watching the movie itself didn’t do much in the way of changing my argument, so I figured I’d keep my actual reactions to it here.
Contrary to the many anti-choice hopes out there, the movie isn’t an anti-abortion or pro-adoption polemic; on the contrary, it was a coming-of-age comedy plus teenage romance with teenage pregnancy as the hook. Credit to Marc for noting, as we left, that the character of Juno was an outlandish teenage character in the same style as Max Fischer from “Rushmore”, and the pregnancy itself functioned in the same way in this movie as Rushmore did in “Rushmore”. Demonizing the abortion clinic to explain why Juno doesn’t abortion (and thereby ruin the entire hook of the movie) is one of the sour notes that doesn’t work in the movie, but as a friend pointed out to me last night, it was probably the only choice the screenwriter had to get the script approved by Fox Searchlight.
Cody’s audition shot for Playboy. I know I’m in love.
“…This is a real paradox for me: My entire life I’ve been told I wasn’t pretty enough. My entire life I was told by people that I was ugly, that I was too tall, that I was flat-chested, that I was this, that I was that. When I was a stripper I was never quite pretty enough. I was never one of the beautiful girls. I was never one of the top earners. Suddenly I achieve something in my life that is purely intellectual and purely creative, and I’m being told that it’s because I’m pretty. To me that is the weirdest, most ironic thing ever. Like all of a sudden I’m attractive when it suits people’s purposes. But in the past when I needed to be attractive I was ugly. So let’s pick. Which is it?” — Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody [Minneapolis City Pages]
Surely she’s aware of the different-kinds-of-pretty phenomenon. The kind of pretty that earns you the big bucks in the strip club would be considered garish and unappealing on someone trying to work geek hot or the hipster pretty thing. If Cody really had the stereotypical stripper/porn star look to her—fake tits, fake tan, bleached blond hair, fake fingernails—she wouldn’t be taken seriously enough to get screenwriting work, and I’m sure she’s well aware of that. Which is shallow and unfair, of course, but not exactly a secret.
That said, I’m deeply alarmed at the way that Cody is being treated like a talking dog by the entertainment press. It’s 2007; is it really that amazing that a woman can write a clever screenplay? (I’m assuming it’s clever. While I want to see “Juno”, I haven’t yet.) I have little doubt that people are in fact casting around for excuses, reasons that she has had this success other than merit. The real irony here is that we’re clearly far away from the day when a woman can rise to the top through brainless hackery, i.e. a female Michael Bay.
One of the benefits/drawbacks of the holidays is the opportunity to venture out of the blue enclave of Austin into the Rest of Texas, where knee-jerk religiosity and jingoism have a foothold. But even a connoisseur of “Jesus loves a fetus” billboards and crying eagle bumper stickers such as myself was still surprised and impressed by the levels of self-congratulatory immoral war-mongering going on in this ad I witnessed in the pre-movie show before the movie “Walk Hard”.
3 Doors Down says gain yourself an insta-manhood by joining the National Guard! Defend the country from foreign invaders, help save people from natural disasters, live the tradition of American self-determination, and take the infinitesimal chance of being deployed to fight in a war overseas. And by “infinitesimal”, they mean, “Hope you like the desert weather and the non-stop fear of ambush by guerrilla forces.”
The sleaze of it all dripped off the screen. This isn’t directly related, but related in spirit. A couple of blogs have noticed the weird standards employed by the MPAA in what posters are acceptable and not. This is terrible and whiny adults who can’t stand having their thoughtless nationalism questioned children can’t be exposed to it.
The subtle hint of how terrible actual, real life torture is disturbs too many beautiful minds, I guess. However, if the movie’s entire purpose is to titillate misogynists that are angry at hot women for not sucking their cocks at the snap of a finger, then the standards get a lot looser:
Fun girls are not completely unknown in the world of comedy.
Meghan O’Rourke tackles the stereotype of women in comedies, especially romantic comedies, as joy killers, after Katherine Heigl got pissed on in the media for telling the truth about how Knocked Up fed off the standard trope of men as fun-loving (if irresponsible) and women as responsible but tedious and boring. It was hard not to be defensive of Knocked Up, and not just because it was so funny, but also because Apatow at least tried to show the parallels between men’s fears and women’s fears about adulthood. He grasped that women do have inner lives, but he just failed to write the female characters with the same understanding he brought to the male characters. He showed a glimmer of understanding that the endless rotation of work in a woman’s life is not necessarily something that women want but have embraced because they feel they don’t have a choice, whereas most movies and shows and commercials that position the men as boisterous children and women as disapproving authority figures seem to think that women are mysterious non-human creatures who get off on being fundamentally unlikeable.
It’s a real disappointment to see this standard sitcom trope continue on into the movies made by bona fide Gen Xers, because one would hope that those of us growing up after the feminist revolution would have a view of women that posits that they are people, with inner lives and hopes and dreams and a sense of humor, instead of functional and oddly demanding appliances. But it’s a zombie sexism we’re dealing with here, and not so easy to kill.
To which I have only one last thing to say, which is watch this clip from the movie Team America:
Spoilers, people, spoilers.
Sorry for the late posting and lack of a FRT. I slept in a little for once, since we went to the midnight premiere last night of The Darjeeling Limited, a movie that caused a lot of “yes, but” reactions in me. The movie sets out to cover the same territory as The Royal Tenebaums, basically how having everything handed to you on a platter can cause people to think they’re the center of the universe, creating in turn a spiritual emptiness, a total lack of grip. This movie was better than Tenebaums, because he made the case that this is true much better. However, he used a lot of teeth-gratingly obvious symbolism at times so the audience didn’t miss the point, which seems like it might be a real threat with a lot of Wes Anderson fans who appear to think his movies are about being mega-quirky and nothing more.
The movie flows really well, though, and in no small part because the three main actors all turn in amazing performances of three brothers who have lived such a life of pampered privilege that, when their father dies, they have basically no internal resources with which to handle it and grieve, and fracture apart, taking solace in separate lives of self-aggrandizing bullshit. I usually find Owen Wilson irritating, but he’s good in this movie like he was in Meet the Parents, because he plays un-self-aware, self-aggrandizing assholes to a T. Jason Schwartzman is solid as the youngest brother, the one who quite possibly is the worst of the three in creating overdramatic problems for himself (involving women, of course) to cope. Adrian Brody is the middle brother, the one who’s had a glimpse of reality and wants to run away. The three try to find some grounding in a boutique “spiritual” tour of India, one-stop-shopping for spiritual wholeness, complete with laminated itineraries and instructions on going through the motions of prayer at all the temples they stop at.
Back when people knew romance.
Time for another wingnut edition of “let’s psychoanalyze movies/music/TV/anything and conclude that the problem was untying women from the stove and giving them shoes”. Jill points to this ridiculous National Review article by Justin Shubow bemoaning, of all things, the existence of buddy-buddy comedies that don’t strain hard enough to conceal the homoerotic jokes that crop up in the 21st century when contemplating homosocial relationships, especially between men. He’s especially angry about the silly scene in Superbad where the two guys fall drunkenly asleep together muttering that they love each other.* The culprit?
Is there any other culprit in the world besides bitches that don’t act right? (Well, I suppose if the issue is poverty or welfare, then it’s racial minorities that don’t act right—however, even then, women get blamed for not obeying the wingnut dictates on sexual behavior.)
Such re-workings are obviously smart for their original laughs and broad audience appeal; coarse, juvenile humor plus heartfelt emotion offers something for both sexes. But why is this new sub-genre being born now? One explanation can be found in the greater social acceptance of men sharing their feelings, an aspect of the more general feminization of the culture.
So, I finally got a chance to see the movie “Jesus Camp” last night—full praise to the filmmakers for doing what is hard to do in this situation, which is stepping aside and letting the subjects do all the talking. And double the credit to them for letting the viewer get involved in people’s personalities. The filmmakers had an eye and ear for the details that might seem mundane at first, but then over time, become quite telling. It helps, I think, that the subjects are so involved in their subculture of hardcore fundamentalist Christianity and that they have so little contact with the outside world that they tend not to have a good handle on what statements, when made to outsiders, will be oh-so-telling. (Like the mother of the kid with the alarming ducktail talking about why she homeschools—she didn’t go to a lot of trouble to hide that homeschooling is a self-esteem issue for her, that it makes her feel that she has important, interesting things to say and impart, a sense I bet she gets from absolutely nothing else in her dreadfully sexist subculture.) The head of the “Jesus camp”, called Kids On Fire School Of Ministry, Becky Fischer, also has this strong inability or lack of desire to conceal that she’s got this wide sadistic streak towards her charges, and that she constantly talks about the importance of indoctrinating them, hits them repeatedly over the head that they need to be willing to die for Christ (which is accompanied by dance routines where the boys dress like soldiers), and runs every meeting at the camp in a way that the kids are crying messes, vacillating between self-flagellating guilt over “sin” and ecstasies of worship. Speaking in tongues, which from what I understand used to be something that was random during Pentecostal worship services, is mandatory in Fisher’s ministry and done on command.
So, I went to see the new David Cronenberg movie Eastern Promises on the spur of the moment yesterday; a girl friend of mine wanted to see it, I like Cronenberg, so we went. It was a movie that I wanted to be excellent but was merely good. The concept and most of the execution was awesome, but it frayed some on the edges in ways that really distracted, and so I have to put it in the B category.
It’s a real shame, too, because the concept of it was something that we need to see more in movies, an excellent rejoinder to the pop culture glamorization of gangsters, from the Godfather movies to gangsta rap that brags about pimping. Most movies about organized crime eventually conclude that it’s wrong and terrible, but they dance around some of the uglier bits to keep the characters sympathetic enough that the audience hangs in. The notion that there’s a masculine glamor to the gangster life is not really challenged in most movies. Not so in this movie. In this movie, the gangsters are portrayed as morons and thugs, absolute creeps who only get by on brutality, and more to the point, whose ridiculous claims to hyper-masculine glamor are pathetic graspings of people who need fantasies to stay in denial of the monsters they’ve become.
But more important than even that is that the story shoves in your face what most gangster movies try to hide—the lives of the women who are kept in slavery to maintain this gangster life. Yes, the prostitutes. Most gangster movies have no idea what to do with the prostitutes. We get small glimpses of them, dancing in the background looking bored, getting slapped on the ass by a crime boss, basically being props. We don’t see them getting raped again and again, one rape after another, racking up the money for those who hold them in captivity through actual force or just hopelessness. We can’t see the gangsters raping women and selling the women to other rapists in most movies, since that bit of information will make the audience hate them too much to care about who kills who and who gets power over who. So this reality of the sexual trafficking of women is politely concealed.
One of these quotes is not like the other:
From Ampersand:
Miller’s study is based on interviews with 61 girls from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds with a known history of intimate partner violence living in the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. The analysis included 53 girls between the ages of 15 and 20 who reported being sexually active and involved in relationships that included recurring patterns of physical, sexual or emotional abuse from a male partner. Twenty-six percent of these girls reported that their partners were actively trying to get them pregnant by manipulating condom use, sabotaging birth control use and making explicit statements about wanting them to become pregnant.
“We were floored by what these girls told us,” Miller recalled. “You think of forced sex as an aspect of abusive relationships, but this takes that abuse a step further to reproductive control of a young woman’s body.”
From the transcript of my 3rd podcast, detailing out one of the many, many strikes against basic reproductive rights made by the Bush administration:
The big news this week is that the Democratic-controlled Congress voted to overturn the global gag rule, which was a ban on any U.S. funding going to family planning organizations that offer abortion services or advice on obtaining those services. Contrary to a lot of anti-choice propaganda, the overturn would not mean that the U.S. would be paying for abortions directly, just working with groups that offer abortion as one of their non-U.S.-funded options. Ronald Reagan instituted the gag rule in 1984, but President Clinton overturned it right away when he came to office. And Bush reinstated it right away when he came into office, which put a serious hurt on the health of the entire world population.
The good news is that Congress overturned the global gag rule, but the bad news is that Bush, who’s beholden to extremist anti-choicers, vetoed the legislation pretty much immediately.
The new Bitch magazine is out and I’m happy to announce that I have an article in it—it’s about Knocked Up, Waitress, and an upcoming book called Knock Yourself Up by Louise Sloan. The article is about looking beyond portrayals of pregnant women in less-than-traditional circumstances in the “will she or won’t she?” abortion lens and at how Hollywood gives into anti-single mother sentiments. More importantly, it’s why I think that Knocked Up really suffered because of it, since the “get them together at all costs” attitude that propelled the final 1/3 of the movie really betrayed the characterization up until that point.
I realize, rereading this article, that if you knew nothing about this movie but my article, you could walk away with the impression that the movie is about Allison’s dilemma more than Ben’s. I made that decision consciously, to reflect what I think was a real strength of Knocked Up, which is that it portrayed Judd Apatow’s strengths in making ensemble comedies more than 40-Year-Old Virgin did. His success is surely why he can move into the ensemble territory more, even though Hollywood clearly finds it harder to market ensemble pieces more than star vehicles. But he’s still in the middle ground, because while Knocked Up had the feel of an ensemble piece for the first 2/3 of the movie, it was marketed like a star vehicle and the last 1/3 of the movie had a hasty rewrite feel to reflect the marketing scheme. It wasn’t just that childbirth is not nearly as hilarious as Hollywood seems to think; it’s also that the movie basically dropped Allison and her family’s stories in favor of making it all about Ben in the end, and he wasn’t interesting enough to carry the movie by himself.
What is the worst movie that you've ever seen that you paid full price to see in a theatre (this eliminates the garden-variety bad video selections).
Also: did you sit through the whole thing? Have you ever walked out on a flim?
A male rodent makes a better French chef than the female human who’s been slaving away at the restaurant for years.
Oh man, this burns me up. Violet blogged about a review of an upcoming biopic on Jane Austen, and apparently the producers/writers/director saw fit to use this opportunity to allow Austen’s genius to be claimed as “really” belonging to men. The movie is controversial because it portrays Austen as having an affair with law student Tom Lefroy. Naturally, the media treats the controversy as being one mostly about sex, but more it seems to be that Austen was given a love affair because the idea of an independent woman who thinks for herself is too much for audiences to handle. Give her a boyfriend, and give the audiences a male figure that’s seen as the brains behind the novelist and we can all rest assured that women don’t do anything original or intelligent for themselves.
True, a 20-year-old Austen did flirt with a law student named Tom Lefroy when he visited in 1795. But the most dirt we have on the pair is that they danced at three Christmas balls before he went back to school and that Austen was “too proud” to ask his aunt about him two years later…..
The press materials released with the movie hedge any bets: The film “spins the few known facts” of a “seemingly brief” and “apparently rapid” romance into a “boldly imagined” love story about Austen and the man who “perhaps, might have stolen her heart” and “awakened” her talent.
It is this definitive love story that inspires such consternation.
“The idea that Tom Lefroy sparked Jane’s brilliance is totally foolish,” says Deirdre Le Faye, author of “Jane Austen: A Family Record.” “She came from a very smart family. By the time she met Tom she was already an accomplished writer.”
And yet, there Movie Tom is, roguishly criticizing a young Jane’s sophomoric writing and introducing her to grown-up novels like the racy “Tom Jones” - which historians say Austen had actually read long before meeting Lefroy.
Sickening. Women can’t have anything for ourselves, can we?
Michael is out for the weekend, enjoying one of those vacation thingies you hear so much about, and I must handle the Arbitrary But Fun Sunday in his stead. This edition is inspired by the July 8th edition and the rounds of blog wars/discussions defending and deriding everything from Michael Bay to Harry Potter. To start off, I bring you the opening of the mostly indefensibly stupid Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, because this part of the movie made me laugh my ass off.
But that is not the movie I’m here to defend. No, like Jay and Silent Bob, I am a big fan of Purple Rain, despite the fact that the movie has many huge strikes against it:
- Mostly incomprehensible.
- The Time is supposed to be better than the Revolution?
- The comedy is not funny.
- It left the unfair and unshakeable impression that Prince is a brooding nutjob, an impression that’s colored everything he’s done since that demonstrates that he’s clever, witty, and probably a lot of fun. Witness the way that everyone thought his awesome and amusing stunt of changing his name to escape a record contract must have been some brooding, incomprehensible bit of weirdness.
- The love scene with the motorcycle, the lake, etc.
- Almost every scene with Apollolina in it.
- The general 80s badness that permeates it.
- The painfully bad acting.
- Wendy and Lisa deserve a better plotline than that.
- The Lifetime networks movie plot about Prince’s parents.
Matt and Atrios have both come to the defense of Harry Potter in the face of some cheap literary snobbery being shot at the books. What I find interesting about the phenomenon is that taking shots at Harry Potter is far more trite than anything Rowling put to paper, except maybe the scene of Harry yelling at Dumbledore. If you’re going to try to be a literary snob, please aim higher than, “I can read big kid books.” Which is what Ron Charles does with his cheap shot snobbery.
But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling’s books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over “Harry Potter” with nary a child in sight. Waterstone’s, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” may be read by more adults than children. Rowling’s U.K. publisher has even been releasing “adult editions.” That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don’t worry. They’re the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets — Cap’n Crunch in a Gucci bag.
I pity the adult who, in a misguided attempt to feel better about himself, squelches the child inside. Surely there are better methods of feeling like a grown-up than forsaking all childish pleasures like breakfast cereals, fantasy novels, comic books, and masturbation, right? Maybe you could buy a mutual fund or learn to drive a car.
