Moot Point

That is me with my boarding pass. You can’t really read it, but it basically says I’m going to Hawaii for Christmas and then Toronto for New Years, so I probably won’t be updating until about January 7.

As such, there’ll be no Weekly Movies on Sunday, so just know I saw Manhattan this week and I still like it.

Happy holidays!

OMG they shut down Gate House.

Best quote from the article:

Recent incidents included putting a cooked pig’s head in a women’s washroom and building a 2.5-metre snow penis outside the residence.

Second best:

Calls to Gooch were referred to Jason Hunter, dean of students at Victoria.

“The penis … the pig’s head,” he said, laughing. “It’s hard to say what the final straw was. I’ve talked to residents who were happy to move out.”

I love that the Toronto Star is reporting on a 2.5 metre snow penis in the Vic College quad.

Recent photos I took off my camera in preparation for Christmas Vacation, which starts very soon.

Last week, Barbara Ehrenreich posts a feminist polemic about Disney princesses. It’s picked up in a couple of places and linked a lot in the “feminist blogosphere.”

This week, this dad named Trey Ellis writes a response. He’s a good feminist dad and his daughter still likes princesses.

Like Ms. Ehrenreich and all good PC parents at first I was terrified. Where had I gone wrong? Why is my little angel (princess?) so obsessed with cuddling her dolly, tea parties and wiping off the dining room table? I knew it was best to let her make her own toy choices but it was hard. It was as if she had been possessed by the Beaver’s mom or Donna Reed. Or maybe she was in long-term training to grow up to become a scullery maid.

Three years later her little brother came along and for a while he delighted in playing dolls with her. Now, however, he is six and has dedicated himself to becoming a ninja.

The more you watch your kids the more you realize that some key gender specifics are as hardwired as hunger and thirst. Most, but not all little girls go through a pink, princessy phase. Most, but not all little boys go through a phase where everything needs to be whacked and/or destroyed.

(Emphasis mine.) How do you know these gender things are hard-wired? Does his daughter have no female peers who like princesses? Watch no TV? Have no contact with women who are traditionally feminine from whom she modeled this behaviour? I find it exceedingly hard to believe that a three year old is actually genetically predisposed to care about painting her nails. I’m not sure what part of the chromosome that’s on.

I honestly don’t think a little girl liking Disney shit is anything to worry about, necessarily; most people aren’t defined by one cultural influence. For example, I loved The Little Mermaid when I was a kid and my parents are fiscal conservatives, but they raised me to think for myself and they valued my intelligence, so I turned out a feminist and somewhat of a commie.

But, like Jezebel points out, grown women are buying tiaras for their weddings. I think the existence of the wedding industry is a pretty good rebuttal to anyone who thinks that the whole princess narrative is something every girl “grows out of.”

I think Ellis really missed the point; he was like “my individual daughter likes princess shit, that doesn’t make me a bad dad.” But Ehrenreich wasn’t talking about him as a dad, she was talking about the princess thing as a cultural and commercial entity, which is some scary shit.

It’s like reality show central here lately, but I’m so tired of writing about fictional movies (oh, school) and what with the writers’ strike, real TV is kind of drying up.

(PR Canada stuff in the more inside in case people aren’t watching it as it airs.) Continue Reading »

So this week is Woody Allen X 5. I’ve discovered that while I like all these movies individually, this much Woody Allen at a time is really hard to take.

1. Take The Money and Run (1969): This isn’t any great shakes, but it’s funny. The cello in a marching band bit still makes me laugh every time.
2. Zelig (1983): So you know how Forrest Gump did that thing where it would magically insert Forrest into famous archival footage?¹ This is like that, except it’s framed as a fake documentary and is way more into re-creating all this cultural ephemera (like 1920s novelty songs!); and it’s kind of less showy than Forrest Gump. Watching this back to back with Take The Money, it’s sort of odd and you can see how Woody Allen does the mockumentary: he sets up this “mysterious” central figure and then gives you this really obvious but kind of still inadequate-seeming explanation for why they are the way they are. (In Zelig’s case, the desire to fit in is pathologized to the point that he can transform himself to fit in with whoever’s around him.)
3. Annie Hall (1977): I don’t think there’s a lot of things to say about this movie that don’t involve the word awesome. I certainly can’t think of any.
4. Sweet & Lowdown (1999): I know I said last week I thought Crimes and Misdemeanors was his last great movie, but this one is definitely “pretty good.” It’s funny, Sean Penn is as good as I’ve ever seen him be (his tendency toward tickyness actually works for him in this context), and the whole thing with the mute character who silently rebukes him and is he kind of projects all this guilt onto her is kind of amazing. It’s sort of weird because it has these fake documentary sections, but it’s unclear what the ontological status of the scenes are: are they cinematic recreations of what the speakers are telling us? Are they what “really” happened? The last bit with the gas station hold-up kind of points to the former, but it’s hard to know how biographers would have access to some of this information, especially when you think about those close-ups of Samantha Morton’s face when he’s playing.
5. Everyone Says I Love You (1996): This isn’t really any better than when I saw it the first time, though it’s much better if you’re watching it from an academic perspective rather than for pure entertainment value. It is interesting that the voiceover narration is done by Woody Allen’s character’s daughter, and that she’s kind of a comically unreliable narrator; but at the same time, the movie totally relies on the narration for coherence. Also interesting is the way the singing is so bad. It’s really human; it’s like he’s pointing out the fakeness of musicals and the songs he really loves. The transitions to singing are abrupt, the songs are often awkward and don’t really suit the situations (how is Goldie Hawn “Through With Love”?). Or he was trying to make a straight musical and failed utterly.
6. Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935): I really liked this. It’s one of Errol Flynn’s first movies, and it’s definitely the kind of thing they were thinking of with Pirates of the Carribbean, but without the 800 other things Pirates had going on (zombies, Keith Richards, etc.). The other reason it makes me think of pirates is how much rides on the charm of Errol Flynn in this: he has some ridiculous lines, but he’s just so much fun to watch. (“Mrs. Barlow, me darlin’, you can tell ‘em if you like that I’ve been most everywhere that fighting was in evidence: I fought for the French against the Spanish and the Spanish against the French… and I learned me seamanship in the Dutch navy. And having had adventure enough in six years to last me six lives, I came here. Hung up the sword and picked up the lancet; became a man of peace and not of war… a healer, not a slayer. And that I’m going to be as long as I’m on top of the sod and not under it.”) One thing I really liked about it was the way it took pains to clarify the political and historical context of his pirating (probably partly for the Production Code, since they had to have him be a pirate without actually having him do anything wrong); it kind of gave it a dimension you don’t usually associate with pirate movies. I have to say, though, the romantic storyline is creepy as hell, especially because they treat it so lightly. He first meets Olivia de Havilland when he’s sold into slavery in Jamaica after he’s wrongly convicted of treason for tending to a wounded anti-Jacobite (is that a thing?). Oh yeah and she literally buys him (to save him, but still). Of course things can never work until he reverses the situation and buys her (to save her from a French pirate who’d kidnapped her, but still). The movie naturally ends with the restoration of Captain Blood to his country after James II is kicked out, and his taking over the position previously held by his girlfriend’s uncle/defacto father, just in case things weren’t patriarchal enough for you. Still, it’s a good time.

¹ Which I’m just realizing was actually directed by Robert Zemeckis, he of Polar Express and Beowulf creepy motion-capture fame! That makes a lot of sense.

You guys, I think this is the turning point where ANTM can’t even pretend that it’s trying to be a real modeling contest anymore.

Not like I ever took it seriously before — I have defended it in the past precisely because it makes it so obvious how ridiculous the fashion industry is — but this one was ridiculous.

Sars from TWOP breaks it down. An excerpt:

Tyra has gotten more and more obnoxiously imperious in the last year or two, but her fucktardedly outsized sense of her own importance isn’t a problem per se — at least, not compared with the problem it must pose for her employees. What is a problem, from a television standpoint, is that that grandiose insistence on choosing the girl who thanks/beseeches/admires Tyra the most fervently, instead of the girl who’s the best qualified (or, you know, qualified at all), voids the competition of any significance. Tyra doesn’t think we notice it, I suspect; Tyra doesn’t see, or is not hearing anyone who tries to tell her, that the motives behind her choices are increasingly obvious.

And whatever, it’s just a show, it doesn’t have to crown the next Evangelista…but Tyra takes herself and all the little branded fillips of the show So Goddamn Seriously, and expects both participants and viewers to take them So Goddamn Seriously, and to take Nigel seriously as Captain Stern of The Good Ship Panel when it’s evident from the fact that he never misses a panel that he can’t get another job? Then she should take the actual process of picking an actual model just as seriously, and Saleisha is Exhibits A through, like, W that it’s not about that for Tyra anymore. …

Also, Jezebel has the scoop on the extent of how much the show seemed fixed in Saleshia’s favour. To summarize, not only did she go to Tyra’s T-Zone camp (worst camp name ever), but she also has walked on runways both on a previous cycle of ANTM, and on Tyra’s talk show. But, the evidence continues to pile up! She also did a national ad in 2006, which is directly against the eligibility requirements. Tyra never should have had her on the show ever, because even if the whole season wasn’t a conspiracy to get her to win instead of one of the likable, pretty girls who are good at modeling that were already cut (Heather, Lisa, Victoria), it really doesn’t do a hell of a lot for the show’s credibility.

I can’t believe I just typed a sentence about America’s Next Top Model’s credibility.

But you know what I mean, right? You at least want the appearance of a competition that actually takes into account the photogeneity that they spend the whole competition supposedly testing. Like, we should at least believe Tyra believes that she made an unbiased choice of the girl who has the most fashion potential.

Seriously, I hope next cycle’s better, this one wasn’t even fun to watch. It’s really started sucking since they fired their writers.

My bizarre attempt to deal with how academically-influenced my response to No Country For Old Men is up at This Recording. Go read.

You should be reading This Recording anyway, it’s awesome.

This hasn’t been a good movie-watching week. Between all the work I have to do, all the work I haven’t been doing, all the marking, and my hideous (but not in any way serious, just embarrassing) drunken injury (it involves a swollen lip), I haven’t had a lot of free time.

1. Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940): What’s weird about this movie is how much they rely on misunderstandings in order for the plot to work. If Vivien Leigh had just told Robert Taylor she was having money trouble while he was away at the front, or she had just told his mom that she’d read in the paper he’d died, instead of acting like a crazy person, then she wouldn’t have been forced to turn to prostitution, and then she wouldn’t have had to feel bad about not living up to his family’s standards. However, it’s still kind of a good watch: the film never acts like she’s bad for prostituting herself; it’s very much treated as a survival tactic. What’s weird is that the movie is constructed as a flashback to WWI from his point of view as he’s shipping off to fight the Nazis in WWII, but the whole story is actually told from her point-of-view. We never follow him to the front, we never find out what happened when he was presumed dead, and we’re sympathetic to her when she’s hanging out with his family and feeling guilty for all the shame she’s supposedly about to bring upon them. (Even though the mother seems pretty forgiving when she confesses.) It was good though; I can’t imagine Vivien Leigh not being amazing — she registers so much in just close-ups on her face.
2. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989): This was maybe his last great movie. He’s made some okay stuff since this and some awful stuff, but I think this was like his last great artistic statement, and it’s not one with a lot of hope. I guess you could argue that it’s a bit self-conscious, what with the characters constantly having conversations about faith and morality and then having the whole thing kind of Greek-chorused by an actual philosopher, but I’m pretty sure that’s why you have Mia Farrow’s line about how whatever philosophy you have, it’s always going to be incomplete. Which is…pretty true. Martin Landau was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as an opthamlogist who arranges to have his mistress killed when she starts making trouble for him; the awesome part is that the “angel on his shoulder” is a rabbi who’s going blind played by Sam Waterston, and the “devil” who talks him into ordering the hit is the late, awesome Jerry Orbach. It’s double awesome because apparently this wasn’t cleverly on purpose since this movie is pre-Law & Order. I can hardly imagine such a time existed.

Oh, and because it’s so short this week–can we talk about how terrible this movie looks?

Thing one is that it is basically horrible that this guy is controlling her life from beyond the grave (because obviously the brittle American lady needs a carefree Irish guy to save her from herself). Thing two is that he inaugurates his new program of controlling her from beyond the grave by sending a delivery guy dressed as an leprechaun. Thing three is it stars (“Academy Award-winning”) Hillary Swank when it obviously should be a Jennifer Garner vehicle. Thing four is that falling down is not inherently comedy. Thing five is that Lisa Kudrow asking a guy if he is gay is not comedy. Thing six is fucking Denny from Grey’s Anatomy, who I hate with unreasonable fervor still. Thing seven is those are the good parts. Please explain to me again why this young hot “Irish” guy would have planned so thoroughly for the unlikely event of his death. Rage!

Random notes, after the jump because of Heroes spoilers: Continue Reading »