Moot Point

Please excuse me for the poor showing this week, I had 2 different unrelated illnesses one right after the other and a parental visit to contend with.

1. The Lizzie Maguire Movie (Jim Fall, 2003): Okay, I was doped up on NeoCitran and prepared for a brainless sick movie, and this still made no sense. It’s like Hillary Duff wrote a Lizzie Maguire fanfic. It was such teen girl wish fulfillment.

Less stupid next week, I promise.

1. Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007): I loved this; it had all the pared-down tension of a Solaris (but I’ve only seen the Soderbergh version) or a 2001, but with a lot less of the flaky faux-mystical stuff. I mean, that stuff’s still there, but on such an abstract level that you could happily just call it symbolism, because there’s so much awesome to talk about in this thing. Boyle created this scary, claustrophobic, almost nauseatingly tense atmosphere — like, I was gripping my armrests and kind of wishing I hadn’t gone to see it by myself — but the film is still gorgeous to look at. The cinematography is fantastic and crisp, the design of the spaceship they’re on is dazzling, and the way they dealt with the sunlight was again, stunning. Most space movies are about fear of and fascination with the dark and the things in it, but in this movie, things get progressively bright. (Also, it was nice to see my girl Michelle Yeoh getting some English-language work that doesn’t involve selling anyone’s virginity!)
2. Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007): Okay, so I loved this. I think it was maybe funnier than Knocked Up. Michael Cera is a comedy genius, I love that guy so much. This was surprisingly authentic to high school. (Not surprising, given how young Seth Rogen is, he was born in 1982, like Alex. That is weird.) Apatow and friends get a lot of flack for the weight their films place on the homosocial bond and the attendant sexism that these things entail, but this wore its guy love so much on its sleeve, it’s hard to stay mad, and it’s really hard to make the criticism stick. Like, they’re not hiding the fact that the movie is about these two guys love each other and that they have to give up their intense bond in order to enter the world of adult heterosexual romance; the girls aren’t very well-drawn as characters because it’s mostly from the perspective of guys who really really really don’t understand women. There’s no reason that the female characters couldn’t be better-developed, but they do appear to have desires and feelings of their own, they just remain mostly unstated because the whole thing is about girls, the final frontier. The whole thing is, Michael Cera’s trying to trick this girl into liking him, but it’s clear that she already does. I do wish someone would make an accurate movie about nerdy girls to balance it out. Liz Lemon and Willow Rosenberg excepted, female dorks are pretty thin on the ground, pop culture wise. I’m not trying to make excuses for the lack of funny ladies in their movies — though I thought Becka’s big striptease scene was pretty funny — but I’m more saying, these guys are making movies about themselves, basically. It’s not their fault that there’s no room for women or minorities to make movies about themselves.
3. Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941): Dang, depression-era populism gets me every time. (This movie was obviously made pre-Pearl Harbor, when America was still worried about the Depression, not about, you know, Hitler). Anyway, it’s about a director who makes happy, escapist, typical 1930s Hollywood fare — slapstick comedies and musicals. He wants to make a big important movie, about the horrible problems of the world called O Brother, Where Art Thou?* But he doesn’t actually know anything about trouble, so he decides to dress as a hobo and go out on the road to see what trouble is really like. His butler basically calls him a dick, because poverty sucks hard.

You see, sir, rich people and theorists – who are usually rich people – think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches – as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.

of course, the director still goes anyway and sees how crappy things are, but he doesn’t really suffer that hard, because he can always go back to his giant house and servants and car and studio and so on. Until he gets robbed and loses his memory and then learns what it’s really like to fall on hard times. There’s a famous scene where the men from his prison camp all go to watch movies in a church (led by a generous, articulate African-American preacher, which in a 1940s Hollywood movie is practically a miracle unto itself) that will totally make you cry your eyes out as it affirms the value of entertainment. It’s kind of a weird movie that gets a little to message-y at the end, but Sturges does this amazing thing where he vaunts the movies for the joy they bring into the humdrum lives of the poor, but manages to do it in a pretty non-condescending way. But it occurs to me now that most of the poor people that we come across are these silent sufferers who don’t get speaking parts or anything — I guess Sturges was “not intruding on their privacy” and also calling “important” movies on their shit. Which I’m always down with.

That’s my week in movies; it’s a pretty long post for only three thigns, but I didn’t have much to do without Alex around tonight. Or until August 30th. Woe! Also, I have three TV-related notes. The first is, I love Mad Men. It doesn’t work so hard at establishing the period now that it’s sort of established its tone of reverence/historical distance, and it’s still freaking gorgeous. Hurray melodrama! The second is, I didn’t realize it until I read it in the TWOP recap, but Rita, the sweet, cautious girlfriend on Dexter is Darla from Buffy! Seriously, she is so different in those two roles, it is insane. Third, MuchMusic is rerunning The OC: I had forgotten how charming and totally watchable the first season of the show was. Even though I own it on DVD. It was hilarious and ridiculous but also fiercely sweet. I miss you, Cohens!

*The source of the title of my favourite Coen Bros. movie!

So I never followed up my weirdly enthusiastic reality show cheerleading post after Pasha’s swift elimination (apparently people weren’t so into his weird mannequin-dress solo — I admit have a greater than average tolerance for camp). Anyway, about halfway through the two hour finale I thought I should have liveblogged it, as the kids say, but I only realized it halfway through.

So instead I thought I’d just post a lazy list review that basically won’t make sense if you didn’t watch the show. (Obviously, spoilers follow.) Continue Reading »

Or: “I’m the Marcia FUCKING Brady of the Upper East Side and sometimes I want to kill myself. So there’s your psychoanalysis, Dr. Freud.” It was a long, good movie week.

1. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977): Holy shit. It’s like a collage of life in a working class LA neighbourhood. It’s all slice of life vignettes, interwoven with children playing horribly dangerous games, and scored with all manner of African-American music. It’s definitely in the neorealist vein, but it doesn’t have the self-seriousness or the detachment that the Italian neorealists have — the whole thing is warm without being sentimental, and it’s pretty unflinching, but still beautiful. I can’t really articulate how amazing the experience of seeing this was; it is seriously one of the best movies I have ever seen. I love movies, but I haven’t had that “wow” moment in a long time, where you’re conscious that you have never seen anything quite like this before, and your heart is breaking for the characters, and also because of the total stylistic genius. I seriously was just sitting there with my mouth open, in amazement.
2. Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999): This is such a good bad movie. I saw this when it came out, which is before I turned 16, and I remember thinking Sarah Michelle Gellar was really trying too hard. My new conclusion is that she thought this movie was supposed be funny, but no one else besides Selma Blair got the message. It’s like Reese and Ryan were in a whole other (boring) movie. I also resent that they really took all the flaws (and really, agency) away from Sebastian. Also, why were they all teenagers? And why did they make the two leads step-siblings?
3. Valmont (Milos Forman, 1989): So this — a more era-faithful adaptation of the same book — was on TV the next day, and it had Colin Firth, so I decided to watch it. I loved what Forman did with the story — instead of making Valmont all schmoopy and lame, he makes him interesting, funny, charming, and really emphasizes how totally scared he is of Mme. de Tourvel’s love. Also, it is much more clear that this is supposed to have social commentary. It’s very much about marriage and pleasure and how women’s hands are tied much more than men’s. It’s awesome to hear Merteuil say that the reason she didn’t get married again was because she didn’t want any man to have a claim over her. I kind of assumed (mostly based on the style and the film quality) that this would be a sort of BBC-ish adaptation, but I wound up thinking it was a really great movie. Young Colin Firth was fantastic — he was so lanky and funny — and Annette Bening was really great. My favourite scene is still when Cecile is finally alone with her music teacher, who’s been writing her love letters, and the first thing they do is hand each other letters and then start to read them. It is funny and Zizek would have a field day.
4. Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969): I had seen this a couple of times before, but Alex hadn’t, so we caught it at the Cinematheque. I noticed lots of little details I hadn’t before, like the little visual joke when Robert Forster’s lighting his cigarette in front of his giant Jean-Paul Belmondo poster. Medium Cool is mostly famous for the scenes that Wexler shot at the riots around the 1968 Chicago DNC — he actually filmed his actors at the actual event, and at one point you can hear someone call out “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” (which Imdb says was dubbed in after the fact, which is even more amazing if you’re thinking about this movie in terms of authenticity and media manipulation, which I do) — but there’s a lot more there. The way Wexler mixes documentary-style stuff with more “constructed” seeming bits — I’m thinking of the transition when he’s interviewing the Kennedy supporter kids and then the camera latches on to Harold on the train and they have a whole sequence of him and the pigeons, all overlaid with really loud, obtrusive music, or how ridiculously bucolic the flashbacks to West Virginia were, or even the way he plays wacky music over the roller derby footage and then cuts it, so you just hear the actual roller derby sounds, which kind of emphasizes the brutality of the whole thing — is really, really interesting. Anyway, I can’t imagine most of the politically engaged cinema of the 1970s without this movie.
5. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, 2007): Oh, so funny. I think a lot of the “80s stuff = instant comedy” that’s been going around lately is really tiresome, but Andy Samberg seems to have the right amount of sincerity vs. irony. I don’t think this kind of thing markets really well though. It obviously wasn’t, like, a triumph of filmmaking or anything, but I think silliness counts for something.
6. 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002): This was, weirdly, on TV the day after the sad death of the real Tony Wilson — coincidence or tribute? — either way, great. I really loved Tristram Shandy, which broke the fourth wall in different ways from this (and is probably a better movie) but I love how smart Winterbottom is about the “authenticity” question. Instead of just making a biopic, he has his main character address the camera frequently, like, pointing out the cameos of the various “real people” in the movie and noting at least one instance where an event was totally fictional. And he mixed in archival footage, most notably of a seminal Sex Pistols show! So part of it was really real. Basically, I think Winterbottom is really savvy about drawing attention to the artificiality of the project and the nature of the medium, but in a still-entertaining way. The CG stuff in the pigeon scene has not aged well though.

In other news, Karl Rove is resigning (!). I think this is a good thing for the world. Also, I am pretty sure I watched another movie this week that I forgot, but I honestly can’t figure out when I would have watched it, so I may have just counted wrong when I was tallying things up.

We here at Moot Point want to place our formal support behind Pasha on So You Think You Can Dance this year. I have liked him a lot from the get go, but this week he sealed the deal by dancing a solo to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which I can’t find on Youtube, but which involved a mannequin (one my favourite dance conventions) and also, he did a little cartwheel, which was very “you want tricks, bitches? I’ll give you tricks.”

(I also loved his hip hop number with Lacey, which surprised no one more than me.)

Also, this…

…is still probably my favourite number from this season. No other dude on that show (and possibly in existence) could have looked as manly in teal tights and pink suspenders. TEAM PASHA.

So today I was reading the thread about Becoming Jane on Pandagon, and this one lady linked to her own hilarious parody of said movie.

Maggie Judy Smith Dench:

Hello Austen! I am a cruel and haughty and one-dimensional snob, but I do lament that it is my misfortune to not be very funnym either. Miss Austen, there’s a prettyish sort of wilderness over there.

Jane:

Stop! I must take a moment to crib your writing in a cheap gesture towards my observational talent. [writes it down] Okay, done! Heave, bosom, heave.

I LOLed, and as pleased she thoroughly encapsulated my sadness that what I’d hoped would be an Austen-esque story about Austen, wherein Jane herself has to navigate the restrictive social milieu she was so famous for satirizing was actually a story of how a girl can’t possibly a good writer until she has “experienced life,” and by life, I mean “a penis.”

So I thought, like I do, “What a great blog! I will read some other posts and see if they are as funny and insightful.” And lo, there was a post on Tina Fey. She was responding to criticism of the piece she — the blogger — had written for Bitch that I had really not enjoyed at the time, but kind of just passed over. She basically says that she gets Tina Fey’s comedy, she just perceives it as failing.

But I don’t think she does. To wit, her description of one episode of 30 Rock, “The C-Word”:

But I keep coming back to Fey’s character. In one episode called “The C-word,” Liz gets called a–you know–by a male underling. She fears she’s become a too-demanding boss, bakes treats for her staff as an apology, and promptly loses all authority. After an angry speech and subsequent collapse in exhaustion, the message has been hammered home: women can’t handle authority.

Okay, see, I literally saw the exact opposite thing in that episode. See, she’s a woman boss in a man’s world, so when she tells an underling to do something he doesn’t want to do, he responds by calling her a cunt — reducing her to nothing more than a sex organ in a classic “keeping women in power down” move. Liz feels guilty for being mean — because women are totally socialized to always be nice — and tries to be a nice boss by baking goodies (woo traditional domesticity!) and letting her employees take advantage of her easygoingness. This obviously doesn’t work and she winds up going back to being a bitch.

In other words, this was a pretty clever, spare depiction of a woman personally dealing with the double bind that women in positions of authority (especially in a male-dominated field) have to deal with, and losing in a way, because women always lose. That’s what a double bind is. When the show ended I am pretty sure I said something like “I can’t believe they got all that in there! It was all feminist, but it didn’t actually explain anything! It was lovable on several different levels! I can’t believe it’s actually on TV, it’s so good! Every week this show gets more awesome!”

So, what is it? How can two avowed feminists see such complete opposite things in the same 22 minutes of TV? Is 30 Rock that hard to understand? Am I crazy? I don’t think I am. Initially, when I started writing this, I was going to say something about how maybe the show is more polysemous than I’d assumed, but I don’t think it really is. Obviously since it’s satire, the show’s values aren’t on the surface, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. And the “some people don’t understand it and are just like ‘haha female incompetence’” argument doesn’t fly for me. It’s like saying Jonathan Swift may not have meant what he wrote about eating babies, but maybe he shouldn’t have written about eating babies anyway, because maybe some people wouldn’t get it and think that eating babies was a good idea. It bugs because generally the people who complain about stuff like this (and I’m not just thinking of 30 Rock, I’m thinking of that Vanity Fair cover with Tony Soprano and the naked lady) are the same people who also complain when pop culture plays to the lowest common denominator.

I just don’t see what this girl sees when she calls Tina Fey as “the Valedictorian who wants to be the popular girl,” I see Fey as getting that it’s unfair that the Valedictorian is valued less than the popular girl, and I see her as really brave for letting the joke be on her. There’s lots of comedy that makes people more comfortable with stereotypes, but 30 Rock’s not it. (Seriously, Tracy Morgan is supposed to make people comfortable?) This is the kind of face-value reading that gives feminist criticism a bad name. Also, I’m not going to pretend that Mean Girls was a great stride for feminism, but come on, having Lindsay Lohan play a mathlete is at least a tiny little baby step.

1. Interview (Steve Buscemi, 2007): This was completely that movie; it’s an indie movie with basically two people that could have been a play, and they’re both kind of unlikeable, but you still switch between “rooting” for one or the other in the weird “contest” of the interview, until it becomes obvious that that one of them has a really bad secret. The ending was a little pat for me, but Sienna Miller was good and Steve Buscemi was great. He never pretends you’re supposed to like his creepy characters, but he’s still completely watchable. If they ever make a live-action version of The Simpsons, he would be my choice to play Moe.
2. The Caretakers (Hall Bartlett, 1963): This came out the same year as Shock Corridor, my favourite crazysploitation movie, but it is way too earnest to be half as much fun. The opening sequence, in which Polly Bergen goes insane is totally virtuosic — it’s incredibly intense and there are moments that are almost avant-garde — but it goes downhill when she gets to the hospital and Robert Stack is a progressive psychiatrist out to prove that “mental patients are people too! and you should try to cure them!” And by downhill, I mean preachy. The best part is how there’s this totally sexist subplot about the nurses who want to stay in the “old ways” and fight Robert Stack at every turn — the reason this is great is that the head nurse is Joan Crawford, in her full-on aging, bleached-hair, always lit in the exact same way (with a shadow falling across her forehead on a diagonal) glory. At one point, she teaches all the nurses judo, wearing this amazing leotard and scarf combo! Anyway, there is a mute crazy character in Robert Stack’s ward, and you know that a mute character introduced in the first act goes off in the third. (Also, this was nominated for three Golden Globes and an Oscar!! What!!)
3. Wonderwall (Joe Massot, 1968): This was kind of a letdown as a fun movie to watch, but it was kind of fascinating as the psychedelic version of the voyeur movie. Having read as much psychoanalytic and feminist film criticism as I have, the whole thing was just one giant treasure trove of voyeurism and objectification and plays on cinema itself. Like, the heroine was a model, so he would see her through this hole in the wall and she’d be posing in these crazy costumes, and at first it wouldn’t be clear why she was displaying herself like that, because it seemed like she was just acting out his fantasies, but then you realized that she was posing for a camera, and he was an unintended secondary audience. In the imaginary essay I would write on this movie, I would probably take the wholly unoriginal tack of talking about that voyeurism in light of spectatorship in suggesting that the Professor is mapping his fantasies onto this woman in the same way that film spectators are, and I’d characterize his eventual intervention into the space on the other side of the “wonderwall” as entirely fantasmatic. Then, I’d talk about how awesome the dream sequence where he fought the girl’s boyfriend with a giant pen, only to be defeated by a giant tube of lipstick was.

Hey, what’s up internet? So my decision to not work this summer has resulted in my not having very much money. This should not have been a surprise to me, but it somehow was! Anyway, because I didn’t get extra funding for next year (I still get my TA funding, I just didn’t get anything else) I realized I would have to borrow some money. So I sucked it up, got a one-month loan from my parents to pay off my summer tuition, and applied to OSAP so I can afford to live next year without Alex working a full time job, which enables him to buy me food sometimes. Things will be tight, but with my good friend Mr. Mastercard and some serious economizing, I should be good until September.

I’m not so concerned about how I’ll have to stop buying sundresses, but I am pretty bummed about borrowing money from my folks, even as a stopgap measure. Surprisingly bummed. I was on the phone with my mom to ask her, and she wasn’t mean about it at all, as soon as I told her what I needed she was all “I’ll go to the bank tomorrow,” right away. Because moms have your back. She sounded a little disappointed, as she knows this stopgap loan’s only a requirement because of my chosen summer of unemployment. Though maybe I was just reading her voice as disappointment because of my guilt and she was just surprised because I haven’t borrowed money from them since I finished undergrad.

I am sad that my lack of funds is keeping me here in The Coov while Alex gets to go to Toronto at the end of the month, but there’s really really nothing I can do about it now.