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Archive for Movies & TV
The Taming of the Shrew
Continuing on my tirade about whores whores and more whores, I’ve decided that the only acceptable script for an interesting woman in which said woman survives happily is The Taming of the Shrew. All scripts written before 1988 (and most since) punish a woman for her freedom, especially her sexual freedom, as well as her willingness to compete with men.
(In the old days, women were punished for unmarried sex. Unmarried sex=slut. In recent years, sexual freedom is not simply unmarried sex. A woman can have unmarried sex without necessarily being a slut, but only if it’s fundamentally pre-married, not un-married. Uncommitted sex is still Teh Slut; women who fall in love and fuck are not punished, but women who fuck for fun are.)
Punishment is herewith defined as death (Looking for Mr. Goodbar), prison (High Sierra), drunken misery (the aforementioned The Long Riders), or just plain ol’ humiliation/ostracism/misery (Dangerous Liaisons).
Anyway, cheer up girls. There’s a way out. The Taming of the Shrew (a.k.a. Annie Get Your Gun, a.k.a. Pillow Talk, a.k.a. Spellbound). Any woman who admits her wrongdoing and gets in touch with her inner wifeliness and desire to be dominated by manly manly macho men is off the hook.
Phew.
(Cross-posted for your reading pleasure.)
Monday Movie Review: The Long Riders, the Wild West, and Whores, Whores, Whores
The Long Riders (1980) 7/10
Jesse and Frank James (James and Stacy Keach) ride with the Younger brothers (David, Keith, and Robert Carradine) and Clell Miller (Randy Quaid), robbing banks and being pursued by the Pinkertons.
The Long Riders is stylish and earthy. It feels authentic and sticks fairly close to history. It is a sweeping celebration of outlaw machismo, a pure boy sort of experience. This movie is so obsessed with the idea of brothers—real brothers—that the fourth Younger brother, John, is here called a cousin, presumably because there wasn’t a fourth Carradine to play him. (The brothers motif continues into Dennis Quaid playing Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest playing the Ford brothers.)
David Carradine gives one of his most relaxed performances. He’s terrific, and the performances in general are good. The complex history of the Civil War guerrilla actions that took place on the Missouri/Kansas border; important to the story of these men, is lost, but then, it is complex, and it’s not the story the movie chooses to tell.
I have lately been fascinated by Westerns. I find them terribly sexy—not in an artificial fetishistic Midnight Cowboy sort of way, but in a cool, silent, scary Man With No Name sort of way; although I suppose that, too, is fetishistic. They are washed, rinsed, and wiped down in testosterone; stark, iconic, and dramatic. They rely on silence, restraint, and very cool costumes.
So naturally, they are usually sexist.
Jews on TV
Via Roberta, I find this short (not very short) history of the portrayal of Jews on television on the wonderfully-named blog Jew Eat Yet?.
The author speaks my heart. My experience of Jews on television, for most of my life, was that Jews are okay as long as they are Woody Allen. A proper Jew is nebbishy, funny but vaguely unpleasant, and preferably short. A Jew must! Not! Be sexy!
And then along came thirtysomething.
A girl can get slammed pretty hard for admitting to thirtysomething love, but I’m brave. The first episode I ever saw was the season 4 opener. As soon as I saw the episode title, Prelude to a Bris, I knew I was in for something different.
As the show opens, Hope (Mel Harris) gives birth to baby Leo. Michael (Ken Olin) is Jewish, Hope is not.
Michael. Is. Jewish. He is tall, handsome, nice, doesn’t wear glasses, isn’t a nebbish, an accountant, or particularly funny. He’s a human being. I am, in short, stunned.
The episode revolves around Michael’s decision to circumcise Leo (the ceremony known as a bris). Michael barely practices Judaism and, like about 50% of American Jews, he has married outside of his religion. He wonders if it even makes sense to go through the ceremony, and he wonders if he can bear to forego it.
This is a real dilemma for many modern Jews, a poignant and complex one, but I had never seen it mentioned on television before. I had never seen drama speak dramatically about the experience of being a Jew.
In the final moments of the episode, Alan King, as Michael’s mother’s boyfriend, plays a role in the ceremony. He dons a prayer shawl as I have seen a hundred Jewish men don prayer shawls—but never on TV. I got a chill, I swear to God, seeing this secret, invisible world, the world of Jews-as-real-people, suddenly become visible.
Plus, y’know, it was brilliantly written and acted and filmed and I was totally hooked and Roberta had the past three seasons on video and I was home with a baby so I watched them until my eyes bled.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, Jews: They’re not just for comic relief anymore.
Monday Movie Review: Sylvia
Sylvia (2003) 4/10
Poet Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) meets poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). They fall in love, marry, and have two children, but are plagued by Ted’s infidelity and Sylvia’s depression. Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963.
In anticipation of the release of Casino Royale, I’ve been seeing as many Daniel Craig movies as I can. There’s no doubt he’s a talented actor and physically powerful. But Sylvia is not a good movie.
It starts off promisingly. The scenes of Sylvia’s first encounter with Ted and of their early relationship are imbued with passion and intensity. Here I thought to myself, ‘How refreshing. A movie about a person who committed suicide that isn’t gray and heavy and sad.’ But soon it turned into exactly that movie.
Sylvia’s depression is shown with little insight. The movie is entirely from her point of view; sympathetic and kind of romantic, exactly the sort of thing that fans of Plath are criticized for—romanticizing suicide. But this single-minded focus damages the movie; without perspective we just can’t tell what’s going on. Sylvia is so brittle and mutable that when she suspects Ted of infidelity it appears to be her own paranoia. In fact, I had to read articles about the movie and the poets themselves to discover that Ted was, in fact, unfaithful virtually every time she suspected him.
Sylvia is filmed as such a neurotic, so terrified and clinging, that when, late in the movie, we see Ted in the actual act of adultery, I still thought it was a paranoid fantasy of Sylvia’s (the editing definitely allowed for it).
Because this is a “classy” project, it is stocked with name actors in brief roles, including Paltrow’s mother (Blythe Danner) playing Sylvia’s mother. Michael Gambon is charming and wasted as Sylvia’s neighbor.
Bond fans will note that Craig dyed his hair a dark brown for the role. Apparently he doesn’t object to changing his appearance when playing real people.
The New Black
I was raised by people with highbrow educations, but I do not, myself, have such an education. I was raised by people who have read the classics, who distinguish between “fiction” and “literature,” but I make no such distinction, and I haven’t read Beowulf. Or Tolstoy. Or Chaucer.
My mother in particular has highbrow tastes, and I have heard with my own ears the phrase “déclassé” pass her lips (in reference to me, of course). (In my defense, my mother doesn’t know how to use Unicode to get accented characters. So I’m not without my charms.)
Anyway, that’s me. Déclassé.
My mother likes drawing room dramas. Merchant & Ivory affairs. Wouldn’t dream of attending a genre film. No spaceships, no James Bond, no elves. Déclassé.
I am bemused by the fact that the brightest, most talented, and most creative people out there, my age and younger, are not, in fact, participating in highbrow creation. The blazing talents of 40 or 30 are working with style, even style-over-substance, with comic books and vampires and hobbits, with sloppy rock-n-roll and vulgarity.
Déclassé, ladies and gentlemen, is the new black.
You know what’s scary?
Having a blog and finding yourself with absolutely nothing to say. So, here’s a mini-linkfest:
I am outraged by this.
I found a blog dedicated to what may well become my favorite new show. What did I think of Studio 60 on Sunset Strip? Well, it was a very engaging way to introduce a series, but as an individual episode, it was not an act of genius. Can’t stand next to the pilot for The West Wing. I agree with the Sunset Strip blog; B+ seems about right. Bradley Whitford’s character is intriguing. Very. I wasn’t one of those Josh-crushy girls for West Wing, but Danny Tripp could definitely get crushy.
Jason at Wild Hunt has been knocking them out of the park all week. Four (count ‘em) posts on the complex relationship between Pagans and Unitarian-Universalism (start here) with lively comments, and then a smart look at the religious nature of Halloween, from both Christian and Pagan perspectives.
Monday Movie Review: Brick
Brick (2005) 10/10
Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is contacted by his ex-girlfriend, desperately seeking his help. He re-enters his former world of dope sellers and criminals, hoping to save her and himself.
You know what you don’t think when you hear that such-and-such a film is a modern film noir? You don’t think it’s a film noir. Seriously. You think it’s got a certain style, a darkness, an edge. You expect, perhaps, particular costumes or a particular tone to the dialogue and the slang. But you don’t expect it to really be film noir.
Brick is film noir. Is. Brendan is Sam Spade. Or maybe Philip Marlowe, because he’s smarter than Spade, but no, he sounds like Spade and thinks like Spade and there’s no doubt in my mind that Laura (Nora Zehetner), from the moment she appears on-screen, is Brigid O’Shaughnessy.
Except that Brick is set at a present day high school.
In a way it makes perfect sense. Noir is a perfectly valid lens through which to view high school: The social circles that barely know each other, the seamy underside hidden from the clueless authorities who think they understand, the back alleys, basements, and parking lots in which teenagers live parallel to, but not quite a part of, the rest of the world. The slang that changes as it goes along, because the whole point is to make sure no one else understands. Noir reads like high school, and high school reads like noir, with its heightened emotions; with big love, big betrayal, and enormous danger.
Most of the young cast is excellent, although Zehetner is a bit weak. Gordon-Levitt gives us a hero who is by turns as tough and smart as he looks, and then is a vulnerable, frightened kid who is faking tough and smart as best he can. Who is totally over the girl from before, and who will live and die by the hope of getting her back. His face is infinitely watchable, and the director knows it, providing a lot of close-ups; indeed, his face is so nuanced and fascinating that studying it furthers the plot. Lukas Haas has a killer supporting role, by turns frightening and funny.
This is definitely a low-budget indie, but first-time director Rian Johnson turns that into an advantage in exactly the way that the original low-budget noirs did: Empty landscapes, hollow halls, blank rooms, that seem to say that there is nothing here but the mystery, nothing but the love and loss and violence. The only real problem with the low-budget nature of Brick is that the sound is kind of fuzzy and some of the rapid-fire dialogue is hard to make out. Thank goodness for DVDs, huh?
A new spam twist
All of a sudden I’ve got a wave of spam for football predictions. I never even heard of football predictions as a thing until I saw Two For the Money. Do you think it’s because I wrote a review?
Monday Movie Review: Kinsey
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.
