Moot Point

If anyone’s been breathlessly following my academic career, what’s up is that I’m finished all my coursework, but I still have like 80 pages of thesis left to write this summer. So I of course went to the movies twice this week. I still haven’t seen Baby Mama or Harold and Kumar, both of which I want to.

1. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, 2008): I know a lot of feminist critics are way more down on Judd Apatow than I am (as are some of my feminist friends), and I totally get why but I respectfully think that focusing on dudes isn’t necessarily a flaw, it’s only a flaw because there are so few movies that do focus on women. (I definitely don’t agree with everything in that Manohla Dargis piece, especially not her characterization of Legally Blonde as another Pretty Woman or “one of those aspirational comedies in which women empower themselves by having their hair and nails done.” Legally Blonde is such a rare win for lady-films because it’s actually about a young woman empowering herself by being awesome at law school. But, it’s interesting.) Anyway, I feel bad that I’ve placed this whole disclaimer because I shouldn’t have to apologize for liking this movie. It’s delightful. Jason Segel is probably the most likeable of the whole Apatow crew and so makes the most sense as a (kind of) romantic hero. Also, while I question the fact that this movie relies on average-looking dude Jason Segel having to choose between such phenomenal hotties as Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis, it is only because it’s unfair that Segel gets to be average-guy goodlooking, but the women in the movie have to be Hollywood goodlooking. (Obviously it makes plot sense in terms of Kristen Bell’s character, who is a TV star, but you know.) Anyway, the point is, it’s a delightful movie. Everyone’s funny, including K-Bell, whose character doesn’t actually turn out to be evil and you do get a sense of why she liked Segel’s character Peter in the first place (and also why he liked her); they kind of leave her character on a weird note, but it’s not really a complete villainization and the movie is kind of better if you pretend that scene didn’t happen (you will know the one I mean if you have seen the movie). Also, and mainly, the funny. Kristen Bell’s character Sarah Marshall is on a crime show that gets cancelled during the course of her vacation — which was, I believe, shot around the same time last year that Veronica Mars got cancelled; and they have this whole joke about this horror movie “she” made about how people die through their cellphones — which sounds an awful lot like Pulse: you know I love the meta. While I’m at it I should probably address the comical presence of penis in the film, given my late preoccupation with cinematic penis. I think it’s nice that they’re trying to make the male frontal nudity less taboo in general, but it was interesting to me that the joke wasn’t even that he was naked, the joke — the thing that got the laugh — was that they showed the penis at all.
   Plus — no one told me this before going in — a major plot point involves a Dracula puppet musical that Segel’s character is writing. This means that Jason Segel actually wrote some of said Dracula puppet musical, which basically means that I love him. (According to some interview on youtube, he actually was working on it in real life, to “launch his career.” Also, he’s writing the new Muppet movie, which means I love him even more.) Anyway here is an unnervingly literal slideshow video someone made of “Dracula’s Lament”:
2. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963): So Godard was kind of a misogynist, but man, he makes beautiful movies. Every frame of Contempt is a work of art, even if I thought the film was flawed. The story is about this couple whose marriage is falling apart because the wife (Brigitte Bardot, constantly being beautiful and wearing wigs and changing her clothes) tells her husband she hates him. There is also a whole meta-movie thing, because the husband is a screenwriter for Fritz Lang’s adaptation of The Oddyssey, a story which everyone reads differently to suit their own view of the world. Jack Palance is definitely a highlight for me, as the movie’s over the top American producer who can barely contain his glee when he sees naked chicks in the dailies. I don’t really like movies that are like “women, how mysterious and changeable they are,” but at least this one seemed to acknowledge in its ambiguous characterization of Bardot’s character, that the mystery is essentially still the man’s problem. I did love the trailer though:
3. Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls of the Heap (Pedro Almodóvar, 1980): This is Almodóvar’s first film, and it’s certainly not his best work, but it is interesting. One thing that is surprsingly on display, even here, is the sense of the law as not really meaning very much, and trying to decide what that means: Pepi gets raped by a policeman and reacts by getting her friends to beat him up; Luci’s husband (the policeman) tries to use the law to get his wife back from her sadomasochistic relationship, but that doesn’t work, so he eventually gets her back by beating her up (which is forgivable because she wants to get beaten up, and yes I realize how problematic it is to have a movie whose main storyline is kind of a tortured excuse for spousal abuse but you have to understand, it’s about a suspended morality). Sorry, I’m getting all thesis-y on you there.
4. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008): Okay so first off, Robert Downey Jr. is absolutely the perfect guy to play Tony Stark — he brings a lot of charm and danger that are absolutely necessary — and this movie is a pretty huge amount of fun. I could have done without the self-sacrificing minority character or the strangely doting female assistant, but they were sort of the least gross versions of either of those action movie tropes possible. I think it was really interesting in its politics. Alex and I were talking on the way home, and I made the observation that if they had wanted to, the movie could have taken a way harder line against the military than it did, but that it probably didn’t because a) this movie is a commercial property in America in 2008 and b) they likely had the cooperation of the US military in filming (which the internet confirms). Alex says (and I agree) that they weren’t explicitly pro-military, they just weren’t anti-military. But to my mind, that’s kind of conspicuously neutral, especially given the real-world situations the movie was about: the story is that Tony goes (awesomely) vigilante to destroy the weapons he designed that had been sold to the “bad guys” in Afghanistan and save the Afghani villagers that they are killing. But of course, in real life if Afghani war lords have US weapons, they likely didn’t get there because one corporate guy acting alone; everyone knows the US military (and their allies in Afghanistan) are fighting guys they helped train. Also, it’s kind of logically inconsistent to decide that making weapons is wrong and you shouldn’t do that because they might wind up killing innocent civilians. But…the US army’s bombs aren’t exactly not killing civilians, you know? It was smart and actually makes it a more interesting movie that someone with different politics could actually watch it and wind up coming to a completely different political conclusion.
   Also worth pointing out, from this io9 review: “It’s best to view Iron Man as a cyborg narrative rather than a superhero one, especially since it follows very few of the superhero conventions. [...] Because the super-suit is powered by the same glowy disk that keeps Tony alive, we’re never able to forget that it’s an extension of his body rather than a costume.”

Contempt still via lj film stills community