Moot Point

I haven’t written a ton about Mad Men since fairly early in its run, though I have loved it from the beginning, back when I had no idea how big it would turn out to be (at least in terms of buzz, if not in terms of actual people watching it). I wrote this shortly after. But since then, with the exception of the occasional note that Jon Hamm is really hot. (I know I’m trying to be all serious writer here, but, I’m sorry, he is! There was a whole episode of 30 Rock about it!)

Anyway, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped watching. I’ve watched and watched and watched. I took Frank O’Hara’s collected poems out of the library after they used Meditations on an Emergency. But I’ve kind of never really felt equal to writing about it – I just have so much to say about it, and I think it says so much for itself.

But I’m rewatching it, and this time I will write out my thoughts more. I will, in all posts, be talking about stuff that’s happened up until the end of Season 2, so if you haven’t been watching the show, my posts will not be a very good primer. You should watch the show though, it’s a good show. (In Canada you can watch every thing for free at the ctv website; I do not know if there is any streaming version available to US audiences?)

Or, if you like rewatches that are about fun, not serious art shows being grad schooled to death when they are basically already doing all the stuff grad schooling usually does, like gender analysis and Making Points About America, and you are in America where the website works for you Tara is doing a 90210 rewatch at her work that is funny.

Anyway…

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So I sort of fell off with the Gossip Girl blogging this year for two reasons: 1) I’ve sort of fallen off with all my blogging and 2) it got really hard to come up with things to say besides “So, Dan and Serena got back together and then broke up again. Again.” Though I loved parts of this season, there was definitely an ebb around the period of Blair getting kicked out of Yale (twice) for (as TWOP’s Jacob has pointed out) inviting someone to the opera at the wrong time, and the aforementioned Serena-Dan relationship yo-yo, not to mention basically the fact that disgusting Aaron Rose was ever on the show. It’s like they had 19 episodes worth of story, but they had to shoot 25.

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I am in love with this new Kanye West video.

Kanye always has the best videos, since his art is as much about his self-conscious creation of himself as a celebrity as it is anything, and music videos are the ultimate star art. No one sings as much about designer clothes as Kanye (”There’s no YSL they can sell/ to get my heart of this hell” is completely the funniest lyric of the year). So the whole thing of him breaking up in compression errors and static and colorbars is so arresting — the whole image of him is clearly just electronic signal — and it makes you think your cable is going out. Plus the imagery goes well with the beepy electronic sound and autotuning that Kanye’s using to distance us from his real feelings.

It’s 1990s R&B day!

Monica:

Aaliyah:

• The Gossip cover:

Hi everyone! What’s up. I’ve been kind of taking an internet vacation from everything but facebook and email and food websites, mainly since I’d started finding all my free time eaten up with my car-crash-type fascination with nonsociety.com. It’s kind of nice, even if Alex now has to update me on all the dumb internet stuff.

But on to more important things.

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Hey so I got behind on my movie blogging, and then I got even further behind, and eventually catching up looked like it wasn’t going to happen, so now I’ve decided to just leave the past in the past, which is a shame, because you are totally missing out on my thoughts on many Oscar-nominated movies, as well as Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which is amazing. I will try to write up some of the “lost months” at some point in the future, since I do have some notes.

Anyway:

1. A Woman of Paris (Charlie Chaplin, 1923): So what happened is, several years ago, I had a passing urge to be more of a Chaplin completist, so I went to zip and added a bunch of movies to my queue. Then, I went to grad school, put my account on hold for two years, and then reactivated the account. Now that I really don’t care that much about Chaplin (City Lights is still my favourite but seriously I don’t think I need to know his whole career), zip sent me three Chaplins in a row. Limelight I saw a couple of weeks ago in the “lost months,” and thought was okay. I really wanted to see it because it’s the only time Chaplin and Keaton still worked together, and I thought it would be all poetic and lovely and stuff, but it had too much of Chaplin’s maudlin side to be much fun. This one, well it’s Chaplin’s first “serious dramatic film” as the title card at the beginning explains. UGH, I thought. It’s about a poor village girl (Edna Purviance) who leaves her true love through a misunderstanding and goes to Paris and then starts seeing this rich engaged playboy type (Adolphe Menjou), but then her true love comes to Paris with his mom and he’s an artist and his mom can’t stand her son wanting to marry someone like her, since she’s basically a whore. Blah blah suicide. Let’s put it this way. It was not as bad as you’d think. It’s briskly paced, the roaring twenties party setpieces are goregous, it’s well-acted — clearly Chaplin knew how to put together a film. The biggest problems were that it failed as a moral drama. It made being the mistress of a rich Parisian playboy, something I actually think would be pretty boring, look like a really sweet deal. You get cool clothes and a great apartment, and Menjou seemed like way more fun than the artist dude she really loved. He never really got mad at her; he seemed to find everything she did delightful. All in all, it really seemed like the way to go. But, more importantly, it just seems like Chaplin was wasting his gifts. His silent comedies are really great — combining visual poetry with sentiment, cuteness with social conscience. Honestly, if you’re Charlie Chaplin, why would you make a better-than-average melodrama when you could make a comedy that no one else could even touch?
2. I Want To Live! (Robert Wise, 1958): I did unreservedly love this though, at least at the time. Susan Hayward won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Barbara Graham, a real woman who sort of drifted around being a petty criminal, then, according to the movie, was unjustly implicated in the murder and robbery of an old lady. There was a whole media circus and her lawyer and this one journalist tried to get her sentence commuted, but in the end, she went to the gas chamber. The movie shows the whole thing and basically portrays her as a fun-loving lady who passed bad cheques, but was wholly innocent of murder. The whole thing rests on Hayward’s portrayal, and she makes Barbara funny and likable and sympathetic — though after the movie Robert Osborne said that Hayward actually believed Graham was guilty. Which, for me, made the way the movie totally sold me on her side of the story more interesting. Other things that were good: contemporary jazz soundtrack, the Academy-Award-nominated-but-awfully-unsubtle cinematography, and the bit at the end where (Pulitzer Prize-winning) journalist Ed Montgomery turns off his hearing aid to drown out the roar of horns honking in apparent celebration of Graham’s death (a bit that Revolutionary Road apparently stole from this).
3. Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008): I finally saw this this week when I realized I’d only seen 2 of the Best Picture nominees this year. Then I realized Doubt didn’t actually get the Best Picture nomination, so I had only seen one (Milk, natch). Anyway, post-Oscar hype (I saw this Thursday), it’s still not a bad movie. If it had been a better year for movies and there was a No Country For Old Men up instead of a bunch of boring middlebrow stuff, I might feel like Slumdog took the award from something greater, but it’s not like Synecdoche, NY or My Winnipeg or Let The Right One In were going to win any more than The Dark Knight or Iron Man was. Of all the nominees, this movie felt the least like it was produced solely to win awards (though its promotion did nothing but position it that way) and the most like it was made for people to watch and enjoy. Its form was pure, pure melodrama, from the children in peril to the last-minute rush to pick up a cell phone — but it still felt fresh. The cinematography and editing were bright and modern, the music is actually relevant to the setting as well as sounding current (MIA was involved!), and most of all, I loved the way the media played a role. The fact that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which gives normal kid Jamal a kind of reality show pseudo-fame, is the centre of the story and the device that brings him and the girl together. Plus, you know, it ends with a dance number.

I kind of feel bad that I’d seen so few of the Oscar movies this year? I still might see The Reader, I guess, but I am really just not particularly interested in all the middlebrowness of it all. After reading the the Film Experience’s Oscar symposium that pretending the Oscars are really supposed to honour the “best” movies of the year is completely insane. It’s never going to be that, it’s always going to be a record of what seemed the biggest and the most movie-ish that year, and I’m kind of okay with that now and I just wish they could get through it in less than three and a half hours. (For the record, though, I loved the totally irrelevant cracked-out Baz Luhrman-stravaganza which I’m guessing will not be well-remembered, but only because it was so insane. They just kept adding in songs! Songs that don’t go together! Some of which are not really from musicals! (”At Last”?) And placing High School Musical 3 in the same context as West Side Story!)

Oh Jackman!

I’ve read a ton of very intelligent blog posts about how not-feminist Beyoncé actually is since the release of I Am…Sasha Fierce, with the regressive gender roles imagined in the two lead singles “If I Were a Boy” and “Single Ladies.” Best? Emily Gould’s:

It’s a feminist anthem! Well, sort of. If you want it to be. It’s a classic post-breakup eff you about being “up in the club” and dancing with another guy to make your ex jealous — “I could care less what you think,” ‘Sasha’ sings, which is always a funny kind of line because, hello, you are making it clear that you’re just acting this way for the dude’s benefit. (cf: “You probably think this song is about you” or “Thanks to you, now I get what I want.”)

(Also, I would add: “I could have another you in a minute”.)

I read them all, and I thought, meh. I mean, they’re right, but since when was Beyoncé supposed to be an uncomplicated feminist icon? She’s always been contradictory. This is the woman who gave us “Independent Woman” but she also gave us “Cater To You” and “Upgrade U.” (The latter is a great song that is offensive in at least 2 or 3 different ways, none of which is really negated by B’s adorable Jay-Z impression.)

Anyway, Bitch Magazine pointed me to the video for the track that I thought of every time someone raised the whole issue. I’m not saying it obviates the problems with her other songs, but “Diva” certainly complicates them.

Also, I kind of love it. That white dress with the crazy paint stains running down the front is reminiscent of the stuff Gaultier made for Victoria Abril in Kika, which is a pretty hearty fuck-you to notions of woman as nothing but objects of visual pleasure.

As Ehren Gresehover points out, it pretty much visualizes Beyoncé’s claim that “a diva is a female version of a hustla.”

In the video (which dropped just before Christmas), she borrows more than just the figurative swagger of male hip-hop stars for her dance moves, and ends it by literally exploding a metaphor for the way women are usually treated in rap music: a beat up pimpmobile full of female mannequin parts is set ablaze by Beyonce’s cigarette as she turns her back and walks away. It’s not a pretty image, but Beyonce seems to be saying that being a successful woman in the music biz isn’t always about being pretty, either.

But that closing image isn’t just exploding a metaphor, it’s taking back the power Jay-Z had in “Crazy In Love,” the song which launched her solo career.

The visual metaphor here is that Beyoncé’s so crazy in love that Jay-Z lights her car on fire, basically blowing her up. Of course, since music videos don’t have to have narrative logic (thank goodness!) she’s still there to dance in a fur coat and body suit while he raps about how much money he has, so it’s okay.

Who’s blowing up cars and walking away without looking back now? In real life, B married Jay-Z, but Sasha Fierce is doing it all on her own now.

So for whatever reasons, my weekly movies posts seem to have permanently morphed themselves into biweekly ones. I can’t promise this’ll change — I want to be writing more, but it doesn’t seem to be coming easily. I keep half-writing posts in my head, promising myself I’ll get them done when I get home from work, and then not actually doing it. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a blog if I make a big thing out of posting. Continue Reading »

Obviously there are a thousand places on the internet you can get Gossip Girl recaps, so this one’s going to be all about the party dresses:

The most prominent last night, Vanessa’s is beautiful, belongs to someone else, and is transparent when you hold it up to the light.

Serena’s is everything at once. It manages to both be a big-skirted ballgown and show off her legs at the same time. Like her, it shouldn’t be that gorgeous, but it works. (And the less said about her no-tie boyfriend, the better.)

Jenny’s reflects her current situation all too well: she is a black-hearted little Dickensian seamstress. With fishnet tights, standby of any girl who’s trying to be more bad than she really is.

The mean girls are all forgettable in pastels.

Blair’s is a little harder to pin down. It’s more structured and old-fashioned, almost parodic of old-Hollywood glamour. It’s a bit too old for her, but she wears it like armor. (Chuck’s tux is like a normal tux, except that his dinner jacket is covered in sequins.)

Also, I know that many might decry the influence of Gossip Girl on teen girls, encouraging, as it does, bitchiness, acquisitiveness, and a complacency about an economy and culture that’s kind of broken. But I don’t know that Gossip Girl isn’t a step above many of the classic teen soap operas even by the measure of female representation. S & B are no Buffy (who had her own problems, but let’s not get into that now), but they’re not exactly passive victims either. They may be bitches, but that’s not a bad thing anymore, remember? Bitches get stuff done. The Gossip Girls, they go after what they want, even if means crazily running away from home to start their own clothing line.¹ Gossip Girls don’t let boys walk all over them. Gossip Girls masturbate.

And while I am mostly grossed out by the transformation of Chuck from would-be rapist to romantic hero, I do applaud that they made their gross alpha-male sex dude the most fey man on television.

Before I get to my sad weekly movie, I need to talk about the new Star Trek trailer: SO BAD.

I can’t even talk about how bad this looks. Alex showed it to me last night and I just started sputtering “SO bad. SO unbelievably bad.” Hoverbikes! Spunky children! (Just like those Star Wars prequels)! “I will not allow you to lecture me.” “Then why don’t you stop me?” It’s like Amok Time, but with a naked chick to quell the homoerotic subtext. (I like to think about the fact that slash fiction might not exist if it weren’t for Star Trek sometimes.)

Other movie trailer that makes me despair for all of cinema: Confessions of a Shopaholic.

It honestly doesn’t look like the same class of train wreck as Star Trek: The New Class, but I just get angry every time I see it. Something inside me just twitches, I think the part that wishes this kind of faux-Bridget Jones thing was over already. Also, most poorly timed movie ever, yes? The premise of the story is basically: “Credit card debt, LOL.” Actually, it might be the best timed movie ever, since the full premise is: “Credit card debt, LOL. Wait, cute girl with huge debts falls for rich guy! Problem solved.” It’s totally the new depression version of those golddigger musicals from the 1930s. We’re in the money, indeed.

Anyway:

1. Joe Vs. The Volcano (John Patrick Shanley, 1990): This movie managed to be both totally awesome and completely terrible at the same time. I kind of admire it for that, even though I can’t really excuse its astounding feats of racism. The story is — Joe is a hypochondriac who finds out he’s dying which allows him to finally start living. He does this by agreeing to jump into a volcano so an industrialist can buy minerals from a fictional island tribe who’ve got crazy superstitions. A magical black cab driver played by Ossie Davis teaches him how to dress. Then he meets some Meg Ryans (she plays three different characters, for no apparent reason). He and the third Meg Ryan go on a boat to the island — but then the boat sinks, so they ride his ridiculous steamer trunks until they drift to the appropriate island.

Then they realize they’re suddenly in love, so they jump into the volcano together. Then they get magically shot out of the volcano, the whole island civilization (a civilization that combines Polynesian, Hebrew, Italian, and other traditions to be equal-opportunity offensive to all ethnicities — seriously, Nathan Lane is involved) is destroyed, but it’s a happy ending, because they realize that blonde Meg Ryan’s dad actually defrauded Joe, by paying his doctor to tell him he was dying of a brain cloud, but actually Joe is totally fine and therefore just almost killed himself for no reason.
It jumps around in tone like crazy, and some of the parts are totally awesome.
The whole first part in the factory looks like Metropolis or Brazil. The way that Shanley creates the fluorescent light atmosphere is really great.

This opening image of the crooked path is pretty clever as an way to start the movie, as well. It’s interesting and German Expressionist-y, and it’s a pretty clear signal about how the narrative’s going to proceed.
I also found LA Meg Ryan really funny, almost despite myself. The bit where she recites the poem? Priceless. “Long ago, the delicate tangles of his hair… covered the emptiness of my hand.”

Of course, this is a movie where he’s a prince just for not boning her.
I totally get why it’s a cult movie, because it’s really unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, and it’s kind of a mess with flashes of greatness. But seriously.

I have no response to that.