Moot Point

1. Ocean’s 13 (Steven Soderbergh, 2007): It was all right. Things I liked: the Pitt-Clooney banter and the way it would pick up mid-conversation, the way the dudes all talk in code and some of it never gets explained, the way they don’t totally explain every single thing, the union thing in the dice factory, the pretty. Things I didn’t like: it was sort of flat and affectless for a “this time, it’s personal” sequel, the total lack of dramatic, exciting payoff. Still, not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
2. The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944): This was interesting; they ran it during the Turner Classic Movies gay images series. Apparently it was really popular with lesbians in the 1940s, because they picked up on this subtext. Both the (male) commentators were just baffled and thought it was such a stretch that this one character was supposed to have lesbian feelings for this other (dead) character, but, like, she had a giant portrait of this woman in her house, and kept talking about how beautiful she was, and there was all this talk about how cold and unwilling she (the dead woman) was to have a child? I thought it was pretty obvious, but I don’t know if I would have felt that way if I hadn’t been cued to look for it. In non-lesbian news, I thought the second love story, with Ruth Hussey was kind of tacked on and also that Ruth Hussey was criminally underused.
3. The Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993): This was both strangely hypnotic and not as bad as you’d think. It was fun to see Schwarzenegger making fun of himself, and also fun when he made some jokes about how terrible politicians are.
4. A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2007): I really liked this a lot. I was worried that Angelina Jolie’s presence would spoil Winterbottom’s obsessive docudrama realism, but it worked in this because of the way her character is positioned in the film. She’s also — and I had forgotten this — really good at acting. It managed to convey the sadness of the situation without trying to score easy ideological points; it hinted at the bigness of the global problems that the characters were rubbing up against without totally making a speech about it. Don’t go not prepared to be really sad.
5. The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978): This is entry #1 in Alex’s and my insane baroque late 70s/early 80s musical screening series. It was awesome: I seriously don’t understand why this movie is still so reviled (it has a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes). For those who are unfamiliar, it’s an update of The Wizard of Oz with an all-black cast and moved to an urban setting. They shot a bunch of it in actual New York. They filmed one huge production number in the actual plaza at the World Trade Center, which was Emerald City in the movie. It is also pretty obviously an allegorical treatment of issues of black identity. Like, the lion, who is exiled from his job as king of the jungle, regains his courage. And the scarecrow learns to value his education and not be subject to peer pressure from the mean crows. And at one point, after Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch (who runs a sweatshop), all these black caricatures who were working there unzip their costumes to reveal their real faces. Even if it’s not very subtle or productive allegory, it’s totally fascinating and super awesome. I seriously want to write a paper on this movie. I have problems.

I may be in the minority, but I love those AFI 100 Years…100 Whatever lists. I mean, I haven’t watched one in years, but those first couple lists, they influenced me a lot. 10 years ago, when I decided I was going to stop seeing shitty new movies and start seeing reliably good old movies. Even before the list came out, I’d bugged my parents to help me make a list of good movies to see, but when it did, I cut out the list from the paper and checked them off as I went.

If not for that list I don’t know if I would have discovered Woody Allen, or Charlie Chaplin, or Orson Welles, or Billy Wilder, or Gene Kelly for that matter. I probably wouldn’t have found Katharine Hepburn, a celebrity role model for the ages if there ever was one. (She wore pants! They called her “box office poison,” so she went back to Broadway. Then, when they wanted to make her play into a movie, she was like “I own the rights, bitches, you have to cast me!” Except she said it much more crisply and New England-ly.) I would have still gotten to know Hitchcock, via my mom, but I don’t know if I would have decided to do a project on him in high school, which led to me reading a bunch of what I later came to know as auteurist criticism of his work. I haven’t really retained the staunch authorship stuff, though it is a useful critical tool, but the work that I read (which included Hitchcock/Truffaut and Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films along with some less good stuff) opened my eyes. It had never occurred to me before I started reading this stuff that movies could be read just like books, that you could find meaning in the framing of shots, in the timing of a cut, in the colour of a dress. I mean, that doesn’t seem like much a revelation now, but when I was 16, it was huge.

Anyway, take that earnest confession as a giant grain of salt when I object to this:

But such lists serve two functions: (1) The television special makes money for the American Film Institute, which is a noble and useful institution, and (2) some kid somewhere is gonna rent “Citizen Kane” and have the same kind of epiphany I had when I first saw it as a teenager. [...] Ah, but there’s the problem: Will they find out about them? Too many younger moviegoers are wasting their precious adolescence frying their brains with vomitoriums posing as slasher movies. A list like the AFI’s can do some good..

Seriously, Roger Ebert? Kids these days need to get away from the torture porn? I’m a nerd and I don’t take myself as typical, but you know, I don’t really think that many college-aged young people can’t appreciate good film. Our generation is the first that really grew up with VCRs (and DVD players and the Criterion Collection and so forth); if anything we have more access and knowledge than earlier generations. Just because a 20 year-old guy (or girl) is more impressed by the opening shot to Fight Club than the burning of Atlanta doesn’t mean he (or she) is a philistine. Maybe they just can’t get past the overt racism and sexism in Gone With the Wind (not that Fight Club doesn’t have its share of covert racism and sexism, but whatever), or the awkward repression that came from making movies under the Hays Code. I don’t know that that’s a bad thing.

1. Women’s Prison (Lewis Seiler, 1955): Thank you, Turner Classic Movies. This movie was awesome. It’s all about the denizens of this women’s prison and how they revolt against their sadistic prison matron (Ida Lupino, with whom I’m now in love). The only bad thing was that the kindly prison doctor (a man) was the one who had to keep the crazy ladies from crossing the line; otherwise it was amazing. Revolution!
2. Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (William Clemens, 1939): Wow, 1930s Nancy Drew is a bitch. She wants to solve mysteries, but she doesn’t, like want to get her hair messed up or something, so she makes her boyfriend do everything. She gets his pay docked because she insists on riding in his work truck and wasting his time, she gets him arrested (twice), oh and he gets fired because he was in jail. The movie ends with the police readying to arrest him a third time for obstruction of justice (again, Nancy’s fault). Hilarious!
3. Brand Upon the Brain (Guy Maddin, 2006): Awesome. This movie is shot mostly silent, narrated by Isabella Rossellini, features extensive mommy issues, and one of the main characters is actually a fictional character who is actually also her brother. Hurray! (Seriously: I love Guy Maddin so hard.)
4. Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998): I always forget how much I love this movie. It was like ten minutes in when we got home last night and I wound up watching the whole thing. It’s totally orgasmic: it’s gorgeous, everyone’s perfect, it was right before the whole world figured out how good most of these people were (except J-Lo, who I still think is fantastic in this movie). The hotel bar scene is definitely one of my top love scenes ever.

True “celebrity” sighting story: Alex and I are in a Main Street Indian restaurant, sitting by the window and enjoying the Vegetarian meal for two (mmmm paneer), when these two dudes walk by. “That’s Bob Blumer,” Alex said. I got a good look at him when he stopped to admire the hipster bike store next door. It’s no the Chief, but Bob Blumer does have the same backpack as me.

The opening credit sequence to Dexter is a masterwork of cinematography and perfectly sets the tone for the show. It does leave me with one question though.

Who ties their shoes before they put on their shirt?

Dear Dana Stevens of Slate,

You apparently saw a different version of Knocked Up than I did.

For one, to complain that discussions of abortion are silenced because people don’t like to talk about abortion, in a movie that shows people being uncomfortable talking about abortion is…kind of running around in circles. Of course the characters don’t talk about abortion a lot: in real life, when they are actually talking about things like that, lots of people are uncomfortable and euphemistic about abortion, especially immature stoner nerds and ladies-who-lunch. Everyone else, including Alison’s sister and Ben, the baby’s father, seem generally supportive and willing to let Alison make her decision on her own. Since Judd Apatow was making a movie about how people act, not a political treatise, I think it is okay that he did not devote excessive screen time to discussing abortion as an option.

For another thing, your characterization of Alison’s situation doesn’t match the one I saw in the movie:

As the mother of a 1-year-old daughter, I think I can say that if she turned up pregnant in her early 20s under exactly Alison’s circumstances—single, barely acquainted with the father, financially dependent (she lives with her married sister), weeping miserably at her first sonogram—I would encourage her to at least consider the possibility of abortion, without in any way impugning the “realness” of the child should she decide to keep it [like Alison's mother does in the film].

In the movie I saw, Alison was a bright, successful woman who appeared to live with her sister (and family) by choice. That she lives with her sister means she does have some kind of support system outside of the dude she barely knows who impregnated her. Also, in the film that I saw, there was some brief non-suspense as Alison weighs her choices, and then a scene in which Alison TELLS BEN THAT SHE HAS MADE A CHOICE TO KEEP THE BABY. This is what pro-choice means. Abortion is clearly available as an option to Alison, but that does require her to choose it. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t really remember anyone saying “having an abortion is bad and wrong.” It is not anti-choice for a woman to keep an unplanned child.

I understand that Knocked Up is a commercial product designed to make money, and that might be part of the reason it didn’t really talk about abortion that much. I also wish that there were more movies that featured non-hysterical depictions of abortion, but the view that abortions don’t necessarily need to be dramatic, guilt-filled affairs generally doesn’t lead to really good drama: it doesn’t really sell tickets.

I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend that pro-choice = pro-abortion, and expect movies to live up to that version of politics. Choice is the key word here, and the movie I saw showed Alison making one. Getting accidentally pregnant and then having the luxury to decide what to do is what pro-choice MEANS.

I saw five movies this week, which shall forever be known as “the week Paris Hilton went to jail.”*

1. Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007): How much did I love this movie? So much! There are very few movies that I watch that are about pregnancy and/or babies that I genuinely enjoy without wishing that movies didn’t get so weird about motherhood, but Waitress I really didn’t have those issues. I knew I was in love when Keri Russell looked at her baby’s hearbeat in the ultrasound and proclaimed that “it didn’t look like much yet, just kind of a blob.” Also, it’s pretty funny and it made me cry. It’s so nice to have people act like real people and do things that might be wrong but not totally run around feeling guilty and being punished for things. Continue Reading »

So tired. Spent most of last night in ER waiting room being supportive for Alex (this was after upgrading Wordpress and getting a new template, not like I was just chilling out and making my blog pretty while Alex was spurting blood all over the place), who cut open the back of his thumb on a broken Ikea dinner plate and has mild nerve damage — on the back of his thumb — and a partially cut tendon. On his right hand! The one he uses for typing! And writing! At his job! I am not good with blood. Lots of blood. The doctor had to use a metal thing to spread open his wound, then he got stiches. Then the ER doc sent us home and told us to come back to some nebulous hand repair team in the real morning, which we couldn’t find, but we found a doctor who fixes hands, so it’s all good. He needs a splint. He will be okay though. Did you know the VGH has a hand clinic? Just for hands.

Three things again:

1. When I was running today I went by this pond in the park and I came within three feet of a great blue motherfucking heron. It was just standing there, it was really cool.
2. Last night I wound up going to bed really late because I read “Chemo World,” and then I couldn’t sleep. It’s a memoir in this month’s Harper’s written by a cancer ward nurse and holy shit it is one powerful piece of writing. She combines the scientific details about how chemo works with anecdotal evidence and perfectly-placed details, and I won’t lie, I could feel my bones freaking out. Seriously:

   Worse than the nausea for many people is a condition called mucositis. Many drugs damage the DNA of cells in the mucus membranes of the entire digestive tract, from mouth to anus, as well as mucous membranes in the vagina. The damage and the release of inflammatory chemicals destroys tiny blood vessels and connective tissue, creating ulcers. Some patients are in such severe pain from mouth sores that they can’t swallow or even speak. They require narcotics and may need days or weeks of what is called TPN, total parenteral nutrition, a metabolically balanced liquid given through the veins. (Now and then, if a patient has a certain sense of humor about his or her dark condition, the nurses will label the big, milky bag: “Steak, baked potatoes, apple pie,” changing the menu day by day.)

   It’s pretty visceral, and that’s not even the part about how the chemo drugs are so toxic that the nurses have to wear gloves when handling the plastic bags, or how one treatment essentially constitutes destroying all your bone marrow and then replacing it with pre-harvested other bone marrow. I think I found it so harrowing because chemo’s universally acknowledged to suck, but no one really talks about it, and I know people who’ve had cancer. I think probably everyone does. And those people I know, this stuff has probably happened to them, privately. But they don’t really talk about it because cancer? Not a fun conversation topic. Ugh.
3. This delicious pineapple dessert thing I made for lunch:
   Continue Reading »

1. Georgia Rule (Gary Marshall, 2007): This is why I’m not a critic. I won’t deny it, Georgia Rule is a bad movie, but I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone says it was/wants it to be. It’s like 60% terrible, 40% awesome; an interesting failure at least. Right off, I don’t think Lindsay Lohan was all that bad; she was playing herself, basically, and there was a lot of weirdness and inconsistency written into her character, but honestly, I think a lot of media people have been unable to separate all the “hungover Lohan shows up late” stories from the movie that actually came out. But I can’t really blame them, since Lohan is essentially playing herself, and her Lohan-ness is kind of one of the main things about the movie, which I saw one writer refer to as a “skank apologia.” It’s also totally not the movie that the trailers tell you it’s going to be — which is a wacky tale of strict grandmas and small-town romance — but rather, it’s a fairly messy family melodrama about child abuse and sexuality and alcoholism and so forth. Unfortunately — despite having two really formidable lead actresses (Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman), a third who I’m still pretty sure can surprise a lot of people, and Cary Elwes — it couldn’t really maintain tone, the whole “Lohan deflowers a Mormon” subplot could have been great but it was totally mishandled, there were moments that I was like “Why is this shot here? Wasn’t she wearing that shirt two days ago?”, and I don’t understand why it was called Georgia Rule. I mean, I know it was because Georgia, she had rules, but I don’t know why those rules were significant?
2. The Distant Journey (Alfred Radok, 1950): I’m not sure why I thought this movie wouldn’t be as depressing it was. It was about the Holocaust, and made in Czechoslovakia just after the Holocaust, when it was still a fresh memory for many people. It was really good though — it combined real documentary and newsreel footage with these wild expressionist angles in an interesting way, and I loved the way the story got less coherent when the heroine went to Terezin, like we weren’t sure what was going on because she wasn’t sure what was going on. It was also interesting because it was shot so soon after, the “Holocaust discourse” hadn’t totally solidified.
3. Paris, je t’aime (Everyone, 2006): What a great date movie. It’s a whole series of short films that are love stories about Paris. Some of them are sweet and some of them are sad and some of them are sad and sweet, but they’re almost all good. Elijah Wood falls in love with a vampire, Juliette Binoche is sad because her son died but then she meets a cowboy, and character actress Margo Martindale totally broke my heart with a poorly-accented French class report.
4. Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007): Loved. It’s drawn a lot of feminist criticism from people who apparently haven’t seen the movie who claim that it somehow skirts the question of abortion, but Apatow totally takes time to have Alison choose to keep the baby. I left a comment at Pajiba criticising the reviewer for saying that feminist objections to the “hot girl gets trapped in a relationship with shlubby guy via pregnancy” storyline are “needlessly commingling politics and comedy” (which by the way I think is a copout answer — art’s always been tied to politics and really can’t be separated), but Apatow is definitely subverting the whole King of Queens thing, not just replicating it. There’s a great scene where Paul Rudd says that being married is like Everybody Loves Raymond, but not funny, and I think that’s kind of the secret motivation to the whole thing — the problems that the characters have are real problems, and you don’t get the sense that they’re solved at the end of the movie, just that everyone’s doing their best. Also, it’s really funny, with the comedy that actually makes people laugh, not the “ha-ha Sandra Bullock fell down” comedy that “romantic comedy” usually signifies. I think Ryan Seacrest was my favourite, mainly because I think Ryan Seacrest is a secret genius.
5. The Whole Ten Yards (Howard Deutch, 2004): I am watching this right now and wow, this is a bad movie. And I kind of liked the first one. There was a creepy Bruce Willis-Matthew Perry gay panic scene in which it is basically implied that they had anal sex or something?, and both the couples that we watched fall in love in the first movie appear to totally hate each other now. It would be great if Bruce Willis and Amanda Peet broke up and then she hooked up with Matthew Perry and Willis hooked up with Natasha Henstridge. But that probably won’t happen. Speaking of Matthew Perry and Amanda Peet, is anyone else watching Studio 60 slowly fade into obscurity? It’s gotten to be like a weekly hourlong metajoke about how much their show is failing?

I went to see four movies in theatres this week. Maybe I should get a job.

Thing One: Spending all this time outside might give a normal person a healthy tan, but I am not a normal person. I am pasty, and don’t tan. As such, I slather on sunscreen, which is only marginally effective because it always comes off when I sweat. The result isn’t so much being tan as “being vaguely pink in colour and covered in freckles.”

You can kind of tell from this picture — note how portions of my face are just patchworks of freckles. How am I not a redhead?

Thing Two: I think this whole jogging thing is actually resulting in weight loss. What? I know. I’m not sure, I don’t own a scale, but I appear to be somewhat more muscular and maybe slightly less large-assed than I was a while ago. For instance, when I flex my arm, you can see the vague outline of a muscle. But THEN I get all weird about body image — like basically every woman ever — I started wanting to lose weight because I am probably a bit heavier than is healthy and my film studies student lifestyle is ridiculously sedentary, but a big part of me also just wants to be thin because I think I would be prettier with a smaller ass. I know this is totally irrational, that our cultural beauty standards are so unrealistic that even the people who are setting them aren’t good enough, I know that there is actually nothing wrong with me, but at the very same time as I think those thoughts, I wish that my stomach was flatter, that my hips were smaller, that I was better-proportioned. That is fucked up. Like, I look at the array of entertainment and “women’s” magazines that are touting various diet secrets of various celebrities — including two separate but nearly identical covers for Tyra Banks — and I’m all “and you know next month they are going to be ‘Nicole Ritchie still looks anorexic’ — they sure want women to feel insecure and guilty and buy things to fix those feelings,” but a part of me still also wants to look more like those women. I don’t understand how I can both not buy in and buy into something at the same time. Culture is weird.

Thing Three: My mom sent me this fancy running watch so you can set your times, so you can set it for how long you want to run before you take a walk break. It is amazing, and a much better task master than me saying, “okay, I will run for all of this song and for two minutes into the next song,” and constantly having to check the song times on my iPod.