I took a sick day today, and I thought, well, I’m home, I’ll have plenty of time to do trivia.
Not so much. I slept most of the day and have been very unfocused.
To hell with you people, you can wait a week.
Love,
Deborah
Monday Movie Review: Margot at the Wedding
Margot at the Wedding (2007) 6/10
After a long period of estrangement, Margot (Nicole Kidman) arrives at the famiy home to attend her sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to Malcolm (Jack Black).
A character study, particularly a study of an unpleasant character, is a tricky thing. A happy ending can betray whatever truth the character has revealed, an unhappy ending can be melodramatic and artificial, while a non-ending is (though trendy) potentially unsatsifying.
Margot at the Wedding reminds me of Half Nelson, an understated study of a drug addict that kind of goes for non-ending. The thing is, in Half Nelson, there’s a level of character movement, and also some conscious choices about non-movement, that make us feel we went somewhere.
There’s a lot that’s very powerful about Margot at the Wedding, but ultimately, it goes nowhere.
Margot is a woman of almost astonishing meanness. She is a bad mother to thirteenish Claude (Zane Paris), to whom she blurts every inappropriate thing you wished mothers would never say. She is comfortable calling her son a “jerk” and an “asshole,” telling him how bad he looks, whining to him about how he treats her, and then pushing him away when he seeks forgiveness.
Late in the movie, Pauline suggests that Margot has Borderline Personality Disorder, which actually makes sense, because Margot is really so incomprehensibly awful.
As the family spends time together, they relax into a conversational style that is unique and odd. This is right; families have that style. They sound like themselves and outsiders don’t understand. The sisters crack up hysterically over something that seems unfunny. They leave things unexplained. At one point they say “Poor Becky” in unison about their sister. We never learn why.
And that’s okay; a movie can have these unanswered questions, these gaps. Because it’s a family portrait, and families, even over-analytical ones like this one, don’t explain themselves to themselves. They don’t say who Becky is or why it’s sad about her.
But there’s supposed to be a payoff. A movement. When the film ends, we’re supposed to know that something shifted, or that there was meaning to it not shifting. And in the end of Margot at the Wedding, I basically felt like an unpleasant person was staying unpleasant, and any shift was just her lying to herself about her functionality like she always does.
The acting all-around is very good, very believable and gentle, although really, they simply must stop casting Kidman as an American; sooner or later her accent always slips. Was there no excellent American actress for the role? It’s stupid.
Deity of the Day: Nymphs
I’m still in Baltimore. I’m here on a visit with my son. And he hugs me and we hold each other and it’s extraordinary.
I was thinking that it’s not about how much I love him. I’m not full of a feeling of love as we might normally describe that. It’s not the heart-wells-up thing. I get that a lot; when I think of him, when I talk to him, when I look at pictures. But holding each other is physical and present and not a feeling of love. A feeling of absorption, rather.
I began to thing how that is like a Greek nymph. They’re always turning into things. To save their virginity or avoid rape, or to be fully absorbed in their love. Echo, loving Narcissus for eternity, or Narcissus loving himself.
But to embrace someone you love so much, to be absorbed in their nature, is nymph-like in the sense of identifying with a physical thing or expression. Nymphs are and become trees, streams, rivers, and other natural objects. Their being is not separate from the being of the object they are.
Absorption. A quality of love I can experience. The hug that is endless, not because you are full of feeling, not because your heart loves, but because you are that hug, your being is inseparable from that embrace.
I feel like I know how Daphne turned into a laurel tree. Just being the thing. Just being.
I’m in Baltimore
Arthur hugged me a lot. It was great. Then I spent all last evening trying to get connectivity in my hotel room. No luck. Then this morning it was like nothing had ever been wrong.
Why what I do matters
My day job is as a tech writer. I do end user documentation, but I also work on things like interface design and usability. This all sounds like gobbledygook until you’re standing in the middle of a situation in which no one cares about interface design or usability.
So I ordered something for Arthur from Office Depot. Their website was down so I called. After the order was placed I was given a Customer ID number and a Confirmation number. These are the exact words the doofus on the phone used. Customer ID number. Confirmation number.
So Arthur didn’t get his item and I went to the website to see what I could see. I find a page called “Order Tracking.”
Step 1: Enter your Order Number.
Step 2: Enter your Phone Number or Account Number.
You understand, I had neither an “Order Number” nor an “Account Number,” and this is where most people would have given up. But being me, and kinda into these things, I entered the Confirmation number as my Order Number, and I entered the Customer ID as the Account Number, and ba-da-bing, there was my order.
On a usability scale, this is a FAIL.
So, my quest is to save the world one web page at a time.
Tuesday Trivia: Have at it
I give up. I am too busy. It’s almost not Tuesday anymore and I just haven’t got time to put together a quiz.
You may play free-for-all. You know the rules. I’ll start.
This actress is a nerd’s dream: She’s been in a Bond movie, made love on the Enterprise, and co-starred in a major superhero movie. Name her.
Monday Movie Review: The Times of Harvey Milk
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) 8/10
This documentary tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay city official elected in the United States. Opening with his assassination, the movie goes back to his life, focusing on his time in San Francisco politics, which ended with his assassination (along with Mayor George Moscone) by Dan White. The film examines the aftermath of Milk’s death, including White’s “Twinkie defense” trial and its results. Directed by Rob Epstein.
I think the most important thing to remember when watching The Times of Harvey Milk is that it was made in 1984, a mere six years after the events depicted. It was made before AIDS was known about by anyone other than epidemiologists. Before gay marriage existed as a political issue. The people interviewed in the movie have had only a short time to gain any perspective on their experiences and their loss. It also explains the hair.
It’s as if the film is two time capsules; the capsule of San Francisco in the 1970s, the beginning of a flamboyant Gay Rights movement, the birth of Castro Street as a gay cultural center, and the high cost of this kind of openness. As well, the capsule of speaking openly as a gay activist to a filmmaker in 1984; neither of these times exist anymore, both are worth looking at.
One interesting thing about watching a documentary is that it allows you to look at your own perceptions and memory. I was a teenager in the 70s. I remember that someone named Harvey Milk was killed. I remember there was a “Twinkie defense” murder trial; I did not remember they were the same murder. I remembered nothing about peaceful or violent demonstrations either. Yet these were important events, and you and I are living in a world very much touched by these events. Harvey would have been proud.
The use of news footage, interviews, photographs, and home movies is well-done. Watching the film is seamless. The film is honest about Milk’s flaws; his combativeness, restlessness, and temper. It is honest about the flaws of gay activists in general; it doesn’t try to portray riots as a good thing, although it is sympathetic to the frustrations that led there. The net effect is kind of adulatory, but the details are not.
Unfortunately, “missing’ footage is not addressed. Early on we learn that Milk’s partner was named Scott Smith. Thereafter, Smith disappeared. I assume he declined to be in the movie, but the film would have been improved by saying so. Is he alive or dead? Was he still Milk’s partner when Milk was killed? Was he at the candlelight vigil that night? The movie doesn’t say. And as you can see, it really stuck in my craw. It dangled, unspoken. People have partners; life is shaped by that. There was a partner for a split-second, and then whoosh, he was gone. In a movie about gay life and about the profound effect of coming out of the closet, that’s too big an omission. An explanation should have been offered.
Anyway, that’s minor. This is an amazing piece of history that too few people know. Rent the movie now, before Milk comes out.
I’m back
I’m kind of exhausted. I had a great time. The people in Louisville are awesome. Gaia’s Spiral (formerly Widdershins) is a great shop with gorgeous handcrafts, art, and ritual objects, and very few books. But lots of MY books. I did readings and talks and then I went to Louisville Pagan Pride and did four million readings. Four. Million. And then there was a party and it’s true what they say about Kentucky and bourbon. Like wow.
So I promise that blogging will resume. I have a movie to review but it might not go up until much later today.
Monday Movie Review: Kinsey (another re-run)
I have a Netflix I’m pretty excited about, but I had to watch the Emmys for my other blog, and I had a lot of personal stuff to deal with, so I never watched a movie. Here’s another rerun. Sorry about that.
Kinsey (2004) 8/10
Biologist Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) decides to focus his research efforts on human sexuality.
Kinsey is an interesting and complex movie. On the one hand, it’s a biopic, making an effort at telling the truth about work that was a breakthrough, and paved the way for an entire field of research. There was no such thing as sex research when Kinsey started, which is why he started, appalled that even the most basic questions about what constituted normal or usual sexuality could not be answered.
In another way, it’s a character study, taking quirky and difficult personalities and looking at them dispassionately. Kinsey is abrasive, disconnected from human feelings, self-important, and pedantic. His wife, Clara (Mac) McMillen (Laura Linney, in a radiant performance), can only be described as an odd duck. By comparison to Kinsey, she is warmth itself, but she, too, is awkward and disconnected, and could not possibly fit in with most people.
The Kinseys had what we’d describe now as a polyamorous relationship, at least at times. It seems most reviewers look at this movie and describe Mac as patient and long-suffering. Not unlike the way that most people describe women in polyamorous relationships, which they assume benefit men and impose upon women. But it seems pretty clear that both of the Kinseys are negotiating difficult emotional and sexual terrain, making mistakes, hurting themselves and each other, and finding some sort of way through. The interpersonal experimentation was probably inevitable in an environment where people were suddenly talking about sex when no one else did. Ultimately, they were also photographing and filming sex, and unsurprisingly, they could not remain dispassionate on the subject of arousal.
The third view of this movie is as a polemic about sexual secrecy, and here I find it most compelling. Kinsey reminds us of a world in which teenage boys were told they would die from masturbation, and were tortured and humiliated to prevent it. Where a woman could believe that “babies came out of navels” until her wedding night, and her husband could believe that oral sex caused infertility and must be avoided at all costs. For all of the flaws in Alfred Kinsey’s methods and sampling, he was a warrior against ignorance. He understood that sexuality was a basic human need and expression, and that to be confused and lost and afraid in regards to it was wrong. In our current era of abstinence-only “education” and purposeful misinformation about birth control, it is worth remembering the kind of world that the far right is trying to revert to.
Friday Catblogging: Strange Things Mingo Does
Mingo loves plastic bags.
Cat on Bag on Chair
This may look like a cat on a chair. It is not. It is a cat having a love affair with a plastic bag that happens to be on a chair. Soon he will begin to suck and chew it.
Frickin ew.
