brenda on 07 Jul 2008
- Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1990): You know? This is, more and more, still not my favourite Almodóvar. There are parts of it I like, but the main story is still: boy likes girl, boy kidnaps girl, girl eventually validates his kidnapping attempt by falling in love with him (!). The thing is, yes, it exposes how lame most love stories that have this kind of plot are by making his actions the product of actual psychosis, so there’s that. It’s obviously meant to make the spectator question the heroine’s choice, but it still is the least fun for me to watch. However, it is important that there’s a whole meta-story where she’s an actress and they’re making a movie and the director of the movie-within-a-movie (whose name, “Maximo Espejo,” means something close to”Great Mirror” in Spanish) — and he says something about how hard it is to tell the difference between a love story and a horror story, which is obviously the point here. It always comes down this question about where the parody line ends and the glamourizing line starts, and that’s obviously going to be different to different viewers. I dunno. I don’t think it’s a resolvable question.
- Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (Sara Sugarman, 2004): This was…surprisingly good. I think it has been established that I will watch anything with Lindsay Lohan, so when this came on, I decided to watch it. It’s about a 15-year-old girl whose mom moves her from NYC (obviously Toronto) to a smallish town in New Jersey. Immortal voice-over line, paraphrased: “Your parents tell you to have hopes and dreams, and then they make you move to New Jersey.” The thing I loved about it is, it’s kind of a treatise in favour of self-invention. The heroine’s birth name is Mary, but she randomly changes it to Lola; her mom keeps calling her Mary though…until (spoiler!) the end of the movie, when she is starring in a modern reinvention of Pygmalion as Eliza Doolittle (another story about self-invention, of a sort), and her mom’s like “You are a Lola.”
Anyway, all her clothes in the movie are like these elaborate costumes. Like, she goes on a hunger strike when her mom won’t let her go to a rock concert, and she dresses as Gandhi. And she has this amazing mourning costume when her favourite band breaks up, with like, black balloons. The word for this is camp, and it is glorious. Better still, in the movie, she suffers basically no negative consequences for any of her actions: she does feel bad about telling her friend her father was dead to seem “more interesting,” but other than that, nothing! When she gets arrested and her dad has to come to the police station to get her out of trouble, he then lets her go to a loft party at a drunken rock star’s house. When she goes on a hunger strike, it works! She changes her name purely through the power of her own will! Lola’s awesome: she sees reality as negotiable.
I have to come back to the spectacle of contemporary My Fair Lady again. Okay, so the school “orchestra” plays on laptops. And the songs are reworkings of “Living For The City” by Stevie Wonder and “Changes” by David Bowie. It’s hilarious. The cast is pretty solid too: her best friend is Allison Pill, who was in Pieces of April and Dear Wendy, and seems to billed pretty high in Milk, the Gus Van Sant Harvey Milk project that’s supposed to come out this year. And Megan Fox is the villain: Lohan’s triumphs over her getting the lead in the school play, meeting this rock star, and beating her at Dance Dance Revolution.
- Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, 2008): I have a whole bunch of different opinions about this movie, and they mostly conflict with each other. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the hell out of it as an action movie, but ideologically, I had some problems. It’s been (justly) compared to Fight Club and The Matrix a lot, which is completely fair, in that the aspects I loved about it were the same that I liked about those movies. As an action movie, it’s successful because the stunts are all spectacular and ridiculous and wonderfully stylish. Like, curving bullets! Flipping a car and totally shooting someone through their sunroof while your car is in midair! I was giddy with glee at this stuff. It’s a really fun movie to watch, and I did enjoy it. But, uh, I had some ideological problems with it, in that it’s basically a wish-fulfillment fantasy about reclaiming your masculinity and not being a put-upon office worker. (Mildly spoilery stuff follows.) Its treatment of women was shocking in its badness — James McAvoy’s girlfriend is this nagging, cheating hobag, his boss is this awful fat woman, and, Angelina Jolie, while she is phenomenal and brings a whole hell of a lot of power and panache to the role, is still playing your basic femme fatale, which necessarily is both awesome in a badass woman way, but disappointing in the way that she has to be “punished.” I also question why the “Fraternity” is made up of foreigners, minorities, and Angelina Jolie; McAvoy has to learn from this group of “others” to be “the man,” but ultimately rejects them in order to really “take control” of his life — which naturally involves lots of big phallic guns. I think there is an argument to be made that it’s so over-the-top with the masculinity discourse that there is this kind of Sirkian irony (for non-film nerds, I mean that it verges into self-parody), but I’m kind of ambivalent about whether the fact that it can be read like that means that it is (cf. the Village Voice review, which ends with “The first rule of Wanted should be: Don’t tell anyone about Fight Club.”). Anyway, most of the metacritic pullquotes, are like “It’s awesome if you stop thinking.”
It is really worth seeing for Angelina though. Whatever issues you have with the way she’s written, the way she plays it she’s 100% in charge. She owns every scene she’s in.
Pop Feminist on 08 Jul 2008 at 7:51 pm #
I totally reacted the same way as you to wanted. There were moments in the film when I seriously considered walking out, and that’s saying something, because usually no matter how much misery I’m in, it doesn’t occur to me. Wanted was so visually/audibly abrasive at times, and so narratively thin throughout that I could barely take it. But the humor undergirding it ended up winning me over. First of all, male wish fulfillment is at its extreme here, but it’s so self-aware it’s hard not to cheer along with it. The “Fuck You” moment with the keyboard, and the scene where he “punches back” that one trainer guy back so hard in the face that he, shoots him, rams his gun through the hole, and blasts out the other side had me howling with laughter.
Finally, I really came around to realizing that it was self-aware of its parody, and I loved it for that. Besides, as you know, Jolie is an enchantress.