Moot Point

I spent too much of this slowly sipping beer and trying to cool down to watch many movies. This week, I’m for sure seeing Wanted.

1. Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993): This, I still think is hugely problematic, but I finally think I’m looking at it right. One of the big things it’s about is different femininities, and all the to-be-looked-at-ness and vulnerabilities they can entail, which is going to be buttressed with a patchwork of theory in my thesis soon. I also finally found a version of it in the right aspect ratio and that made a huge difference as compared to the horrible video tape versions I had seen thus far.
2. High Heels (Pedro Almodóvar, 1991): This is still one of my favourite of the Almodóvars. My favourite bit is the news reporter’s on-air confession to her husband’s murder, which really freaks out the sign-language interpreter. She does this whole speech about how once she realized he was dead, she started taking pictures of her and her husband’s apartment, which she shows to the audience. And when the police comes, she asks them for a minute, so she can say “That’s all for now.”
   The best part? The floor director, who totally is freaking out this whole time? It’s Javier Bardem! Before he was famous!
   
   I love his reaction shot here. Oh, and there’s a drag queen. You can’t totally tell without the movements, but the gals in the audience are totally mimicking all her movements.

I keep mostly drafting these and then forgetting to actually post them. I guess the world can handle a delay in the hot news of what movies I watched this week. I haven’t been to the theatre in awhile, but this summer has not been a particularly inspiring one for movies. Plus, thesis. I’m looking forward to that one where James MacAvoy shoots curvy and Angelina Jolie rides the tops of moving vehicles, though.

1. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1989): I was not really looking forward to watching this again; for some reason I remembered finding it to be amongst the more annoying of Almodóvar’s movies, but once I got into it I actually wound up liking it quite a lot now that I have been able to fit it into my critical program. I’m noting I watched it here, because of my obsessive record-keeping, but I actually can’t really force myself to write anything more about Almodóvar these days.
2. The Strip (László Kardos, 1951): I missed the beginning of this, but I had to write it up anyway. It’s a film noir. Starring Mickey Rooney (!). He’s a drummer in a jazz club in LA and he gets this girl he likes who wants to be a movie star involved with some gangsters and things don’t end well — though all the actual violence is offscreen. What’s interesting about it is, it’s kind of good. Like, the band at the club has Louis Armstrong — and if that’s really Mickey Rooney playing the drums, which I think it is, he was really good at it. And I love the real LA locations (something I’ve had an eye for ever since I saw Los Angeles Plays Itself) plus the cinematography is frequently gorgeous. Also, Mickey Rooney does a good job insofar as his actual performance. Unfortunately, he’s still Mickey Rooney, and he still looks about 12 years old even though he would’ve been 30, so you’re constantly aware of watching a noir with Mickey Rooney. It’s still a pretty interesting artefact though.
3. Fast and Furious (Busby Berkeley, 1939): You know that “Fast-Talking High Trousers” bit from Family Guy? That’s what this is like. It’s apparently the third in a series of sub-Thin Man husband-and-wife detective stories, which starred a whole bunch of different people. This one had Franchot Tone, who’s not very interesting, and Ann Sothern does her best with the wife part. I really…don’t have anything to say about it, it’s a 1930s detective movie/screwball comedy. The screwball bits aren’t bad, at that; the bit with the lion is very Bringing Up Baby. As for why Busby Berkeley directed this, I have no idea; maybe they were initially going to do a musical number surrounding the beauty pageant, but it got cut? It seemed weird to have Busby B. directing a movie that involved a performance and many, many women, but not to have an elaborate musical number.
4. The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorcese, 1993): I thought I should watch this since it keeps coming up in books about fashion and cinema — you can see why when you watch it, Scorcese really spends a lot of time doing close-ups of gloves and jewelry and lace and so on. I have mentioned my love of Mad Men several times on this site, so it won’t surprise anyone that I eat this kind of thing up with a spoon. I love the idea that something about a society can be revealed in its day-to-day objects. I honestly didn’t expect to like it very much — I knew it was a movie about the stifling stiflery of 19th century society life, and I expected it to be as much of a challenge as The Leopard, but I was pleasantly surprised by it being actually really awesome. I can’t remember who said it, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard someone say that Scorcese’s movies are always kind of about making movies as much as they are about the actual story in the movie itself. To my mind, The Age of Innocence seemed to fit that bill: it’s as much about making a “costume movie” as it is about anything that’s actually in the movie. It’s kind of a good thing, because then it becomes about how to represent historical realities to a present audience without sacrificing accuracy or making things too opaque. So it’s presenting the past, but it’s using contemporary cinematic techniques.

So like, my life is getting eaten by thesis and a sudden urge to cook and do nothing all the time. So this one’s short and also late.

The other big time-eater has been my rekindled love of So You Think You Can Dance. Joshua & Katee are my favourite couple so far, but honestly, I keep feeling bad for all the poor contempo boys that are too “twee” or “not masculine enough” or alternately get praise for being a “real man.” There was always an undercurrent of those issues on the show, but I always rationalized it in terms of the dancing being about playing a role, and that part of that role included a fairly conventional kind of masculinity, but this year maybe after reading all this gender-y stuff, it seems totally out of hand.

Anyway, onto movies:

1. Sawdust and Tinsel (Ingmar Bergman, 1953): I really probably should know Bergman better than I do at this point. I liked this, mainly for the classic Bergman raw nerve school of acting, and Sven Nykvist cinematography. This was his first film for Bergman and I feel like you could really identify him in the way the images have this sort of flatness to them, sort of two-dimensional? I don’t think there’s much you can say about Bergman, but this starts out with a sweet semi-silent portrayal of a clown whose woman humiliates him which was really interesting.
2. Motel Hell (Kevin Connor, 1980): It’s like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, only without all the actual scary parts, and with Rory Calhoun playing a farmer/butcher who, uh…there are people in the sausages. Reading the wiki page and looking at the post reproduced there — “You might just die…laughing!” — it was apparently supposed to be a comedy, so that’s a plus, because it kind of failed at being scary. The weirdest thing about it was how much better an actor Rory Calhoun was than everyone else in the movie, so there was sort of an unintentional (or intentional?) John Waters casting effect where the styles of acting are so different that it’s immediately distancing.
3. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963): So despite the fact that I am the film studies major in the relationship, Alex was actually the one who picked this. It’s a three-hour long historical drama about the slowly fading aristocracy in 19th century Italy, and I think how much you enjoy the movie is directly related to your response to that sentence. It does a really great job of evoking how stifled and stilted aristocratic life was for the characters, but that atmosphere means you wind up with a really stilted and stifled movie. So I certainly appreciated it, in the way that I appreciate historical museums full of insanely detailed costumes and objects, but I don’t know that I liked it. It’s not really my favourite kind of movie; neorealism’s great, but it’s just not my thing. (This isn’t neorealim per se, but Visconti was a neorealist and you can certainly see the influence in the long takes and the emphasis on everyday life over grand historical moments.) I did appreciate the metacinematic touch that the patriarch who is aware that he is on the way out is played by classic Hollywood star Burt Lancaster, and the young folks who represent “the future” are played by new wavey Euro stars Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale.
4. Zero Patience (John Greyson, 1993): So I am a little bit in love with this movie. It’s a debunking of the whole story that this one Air Canada flight attendant brought AIDS to North America (”Patient Zero”) and there’s a lot of didactic “educational film” stuff in there and it’s really pro-AIDS activism, but it also is a musical with a love story between Patient Zero’s ghost and Victorian sexologist Sir Richard Francis Burton, who is still alive and living in Toronto and trying to make a sensationalistic museum exhibit about Zero in the movie. Dick sings my favourite song in the movie, “Culture of Certainty” which includes a “Let’s all be empiricists” chorus. There is also a song about gay sex that is actually sung by assholes. What I love is that the whole movie’s such a goofy pastiche, but by the end, there is still something sweetly touching when Patient Zero’s finally able to disappear, with the water and the smoke and the video machine and Sir Richard Francis Burton (who also apparently can’t disappear since his “unfortunate encounter with the fountain of youth) obviously touched.
5. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Valée, 2005): Another gay-themed Canadian movie this week. This is in a lot of ways your standard coming-of-age story, with a whole thing with him (the gay son that the dad couldn’t accept and he also couldn’t really accept his own gayness) needing to go to Jerusalem and find himself and everything, but what I really liked was that it’s also a movie about record collections as a way of marking time and also father-son bonding. It’s also a very well-done coming-of-age story; I’m not really a fan of the Bildungsroman thing, but I like when movies about childhood skew heavily subjective, so you get that sense of how everything is really big and scary and little moments turn into huge traumas.

Weekly Movies is incredibly late this week because my whole life kind of got taken over by Big Academic Conference, which came to my town, and then I apparently forgot to actually publish the post. So sorry on both counts!

1. Jesus Christ Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973): Oh, I’m in love with this movie I could write a book about it. Jesus movies aren’t usually really my cup of tea, but this one gets it right by making the Jesus story work in terms of politics and history without really diminishing the whole son-of-God thing. It kind of leaves the God part open to interpretation: it doesn’t suggest Jesus didn’t perform miracles or wasn’t the son of God, but it also doesn’t actually show any of those miracles or anything, and in fact takes a bunch of time to acknowledge that what we’re watching is a performance, so you could either take it as a retelling of hugely important historical events or, you know, the actual God parts.
   Also, how gay is Judas for Jesus in this movie? Pretty gay, is the answer. I thought I was reading too much into the way they were acting with each other, like the way Jesus takes Judas’s hand and is all “Think while you still have me, move while you still see me” and they totally seem to communicate with their eyes what Jesus is getting ready to do, not to mention how jealous he is of Mary Madgalene. But Judas’ reprise of Mary Magdalene’s big ballad “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” is pretty much the clincher.
   
   FYI I talk about the endings of recent movies that aren’t from the Bible (wherein: yes, Jesus dies for our sins) after this. Continue Reading »

Because I am, as a blogger, somewhat inconsistent in bringing you the quality pop cultural analysis you expect, allow me to point you to some other analysis of same:

First, a discussion of Valentino as the first teen idol at Pop Feminst, which is part of an ongoing teen idols series that combines the greatness of nostalgia with tought-provoking and cogent arguments in favour of the power of the teen girl as consumer and cultural arbiter. At the end of her post, Rachel asks some interesting questions:

Valentino is a man who lived a celebrity without precedent. How much of the construction of the “teen idol” is socio-historical (based primarily in Valentino’s androgynous template), and how much of it is intuitive, or– though I despise the word– “natural”? Why was the first teen idol a movie star and not (as is much more common) a music star? Was it because Valentino predates rock ‘n’ roll/pop? Can Valentino be seen as a historical figure in rock ‘n’ roll, having set the standard for the ideal fandom?

Most important: with the 19th Amendment ratified in the United States 1920, was Valentino’s meteoric rise in 1921 somehow connected to the anxiety/energy surrounding women’s liberation?

I suspect the first teen idol being a movie star has a lot to do with the non-existence in 1921 of synchronized sound on film.

On a completely unrelated note, I was thinking about this post on This Recording while I was watching one of the myriad Family Guy reruns that are on my television in any given day. Molly quotes Cartman on his Family Guy hate:

Everywhere I go: “Hey Cartman you must like Family Guy, right?” “Hey, your sense of humor reminds me of Family Guy, Cartman!” I am nothing like Family Guy! When I make jokes they are inherent to a story! Deep situational and emotional jokes based on what is relevant and has a point, not just one random interchangeable joke after another!

On the one hand that is an entirely true criticism of Family Guy, because South Park is still making satire in the classical way — when they make a joke, it usually has a point, even if I don’t always agree with it. Family Guy has a problem, I think, in that their poor taste comedy sometimes blurs the line between, for example, making fun of racist culture and just being racist,¹ but I think the reason Family Guy is so popular is the same reason that torture porn movies make so much money: there’s no clear agenda they’re pushing, the spectacle is in the offensiveness. The whole point of Family Guy is like “Look what I made you watch! That dog just punched that baby! That guy is a total rapist! And you’re laughing at it!” It’s kind of a dialogue with the viewer about taste. Does this mean that it basically just makes people really comfortable with poor taste and offensiveness? Maybe. Especially when it’s just the same thing week after week. Also, when people quote it out of context without realizing that, coming from a cartoon, something might have ambiguous status on the satire-offensiveness line, but coming from just like, a dude you know, it moves onto the wrong side.

Okay, back to the thesis.

Emily Gould gets maybe too recursive on how she would have responded to her own NYT Mag story:

If I was still working at Gawker or another media blog, rushing to move on to the next post, I probably would have glanced through an article this long for maybe five minutes, skimmed the initial responses and gotten the sense that other people hadn’t liked it, and then started formulating a post along these lines:

a) Aw, poor doddering New York Times, trying to clue us into the niceties of this nutty “Web blogging” trend. What a pathetic attempt to boost online readership. And, like, soooo long!

b) Look at that picture. And she clearly can’t write — hello, that “my life was cozy and safe”? Is she in a freshman-year personal-essay class? — so obviously she is only in The Times because she’s marginally attractive. Or maybe she’s sleeping with someone influential there.

c) And if I’d actually read the article, I probably would have read the part describing Gawker and the self-reflexive world Gawker describes and I would have felt personally attacked, like someone was telling me my all-consuming job and, therefore, my life, were meaningless. So I would have responded defensively. Like, how dare this person position herself as somehow above the stuff she used to do! She’s no better than us, really. In fact, she’s worse.

d) And you know, on some level I would have felt jealous, so I probably would have called me an attention whore or a narcissist, because that’s what you call people who are getting the kind of attention you feel you deserve but are, unfairly, not getting.

NYT made me laugh re the 1001 Books thing:

I appreciate the sense of urgency because I feel it myself. But when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the bar very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

“In Defense of Saccharin(e)” by Leslie Jamison, so an essay after my own heart:

Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of legibility—insisting we can read sloth and discipline tallied in bank accounts and inscribed across the body itself—and artificial sweeteners threaten this. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. Oscar Wilde summed up this indignance: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” This speaks to a privileging of the Horatio Alger ethos within our aesthetic economies: you need to earn your reactions to literature, not simply have easy sentiment handed out like food stamps across the boundaries of the text.

How do we earn? By parsing figurative opacity, close reading metaphor, tracking nuances of character, disseminating real world repercussions.

We are disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy. We want to have our cake without eating it too. Many women describe heaven as a place where food doesn’t have calories. And now we’ve done it here on Earth: liberated our bodies from the sins of our mouths.

(This last via Jezebel, who take the whole sweetener metaphor a kind of literally.)

1. Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984): I have to confess, I kind of hated this. I wanted to like it, I love The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, so I kind of figured I’d like this. But…uh, there is some rape in it? That is not portrayed as horrible and ugly but as though it’s like somehow nice that the rich popular dude “gives” his passed out drunk girlfriend to a nerdy virgin to drive home. And then she wakes up in the morning and is nice to him, and tells him that she “enjoyed” it. Uh, ew.
   Also that whole Long Duck Dong thing is also kind of racist? It could have not been, but it so, so was. The Molly Ringwald can’t catch a break bits are actually pretty funny, as are the John Cusack and that other guy geek chorus, and I get the whole Bakhtinian carnival thing¹ but the whole thing, it’s kind of gross. I realize it’s supposed to be a classic for our times, but it has not aged well at all.
   
   I still love you, Molly Ringwald!
2. What Have I Done To Deserve This?! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984): This holds up really really well; it’s Almodóvar’s fourth film and the cinematography and storytelling are leaps and bounds above the first three. It’s not as polished or bright as the stuff that came after and that really made him famous, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable to watch again.
3. The Law of Desire (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987): I’ve probably said contradictory things before, but this is my favourite Almodóvar. Things I like: it is beautiful, visually daring in cinematography and fantastically overwrought in mise-en-scene, with ’80s fashion and kitsch altars; you get gay love treated as just part of life, without any kind of weird stress or hysteria, that may not seem like a big deal now, but it sure as hell was in 1987; young, crazy Antonio Banderas, in repressed gay love with Eusebio Poncela, seduced by his movies; Carmen Maura’s performance as the transsexual Tina is still one of the best things I have ever seen, she seems so aware of her body and she seems to feel everything so unabashedly. This was the movie that made me fall in love with Almodóvar.

Oh hey so after putting it off and being stuck in my horrible long hair rut for years, I finally sprung for a haircut. Continue Reading »

There is actually only one weekly movie this past week, because of a brief trip to exotic Ottawa (and actually exotic Gatineau as well) for family stuff.

1. Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986): This one’s really grown on me since the first time I watched it. I think my problem was that I was looking too hard for stuff below the surface when obviously the surface was the whole point. So instead of doing a capsule review and image (which I could do, I promise, I’ve been writing my ass off about this movie), here are my top 5 Matador frame grabs in the giantest files ever: Continue Reading »

Drawn from here. I found the 2nd ed. from 2004 first and started bolding ones I’ve seen and starring favourites before I realized it’s been updated a bunch of times since then; I don’t think the count would change that much, as I’ve seen a lot of the added ones. I think it’s probably okay to stay with an older version, the newer films are always just guesses about what’s going to age well anyway. As far as I can tell I’ve seen 442 of these but I didn’t go through and count them, I’m basing this on Word’s search and replace (counting only ones I’ve seen all of, not ones I’ve seen most of but fell asleep during like Magnolia). That is not bad, but there are some embarrassing omissions for a professional film student (especially the lack of Kurosawa and Bergman). Feel free to look for ones that I haven’t seen that most normal people have seen and be like “You haven’t seen Top Gun?!” in the comments! Continue Reading »