Movies | making edible playdough is hegemonic.

Posts Tagged ‘movies’

film review: 8: the Mormon Proposition

Feb 7th, 11 / 0 Comments

I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear my state’s GOP lawmakers are reviving a push to pass an amendment banning gay marriage. Which reminds me: I’ve recently started reviewing films for my local public radio station, WFIU. You can see my first review, of the documentary film 8: the Mormon Proposition, here.I’m also including the beginning of the review below.

Just FYI, this review led WFIU to post, for apparently the first time ever, a disclaimer explaining that my views do not necessarily reflect those of the station. TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION.

Movie Review: ‘8: The Mormon Proposition’

Because I’m a fan of exposing bigotry and hypocrisy whenever possible, because I’m a fan of following the money trail in politics, and because I’m a fan of tearing down cultural institutions that encourage hate, the new documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition is the kind of film I really want to like.

The man behind it, Reed Cowan, has explained that his goal was to break through the “impenetrable fortress” of the Church of Latter Day Saints, in order to expose its role in the passage of California’s Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment that made it illegal for gays to marry in the state. That’s a cause I’d love to get behind—if the film didn’t commit some of the very sins it hangs on the doorstep of the Mormon Church. (read the rest of the review here.)

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

film review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Dec 21st, 10 / 1 Comment

***spoiler alert***

***foul language alert***

If you’re keeping track, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the third in a series of mystery novels by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. It’s also the third in a series of film adaptations of the novels. I’ve written before about some of the feminist critiques of the books, though I haven’t read the books myself. I have seen all three films; I praised the first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for its feminist admiration of its hero, Lisbeth Salander. I took issue with the second, The Girl Who Played with Fire, for what felt like an anti-feminist exploitation of the bodies, desires, and impulses of all of the female characters.

I’m happy to announce that the series has righted itself with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, a dark, dark courtroom drama that finally allows us entry into the world of the tiny, angry, brilliant, troubled woman whose very existence has been defined by the evil men who surround her.

Allows us entry, but begrudgingly and without a word of welcome. In this film, Lisbeth is the most sullen, defiantly silent, and unyielding we’ve ever seen her, even as the cruel details, the horrible cruelties, of her life are revealed to the world. If you’ve read or seen the first two parts of the series, you know that as a child Lisbeth Salander was committed against her will to a psychiatric hospital, where she was subjected to ‘treatments’ that may or may not have included electroshock therapy, sexual abuse by one or more male doctors, and near complete isolation from other patients. You know that she was declared mentally incompetent upon her eventual release from the hospital and handed off to a series of male guardians who did not always have her ‘care’ in mind. You know that one of her ‘guardians’ raped her, brutally. You know that her father tried, among other things, to have her killed. This third film opens with Lisbeth unconscious in a hospital bed, recovering from: being buried alive, being brutally beaten to the point of crushed bones by her half brother, and being shot in the head. She’s also under arrest for the attempted murder of her father.

There are people who want to help her, most notably the chivalrous Mikael Blomqvist, the intrepid journalist who in the novels apparently broke Lisbeth’s heart but who in the films seems sort of pathetically in love with her. He risks his life, and the lives of his employees, to secure documents that can exonerate Lisbeth at trial. He pressures his sister, an attorney, to take Lisbeth’s case; she is initially annoyed and frustrated with Lisbeth but comes around to Michael’s way of thinking before the end. There is also a kind male doctor who agrees to smuggle things into Lisbeth’s room and who holds the police at bay for as long as he can while Lisbeth recovers.

To these people, Lisbeth offers not a single grateful word. She refuses to respond to any of the doctor’s gentle and curious inquiries into her life. She refuses to see or speak to Mikael. And she refuses to answer any of her attorney’s questions, even though it appears that she is working against her own best interest by doing so.

Lisbeth is so silent in this film that it’s squirm-inducing. When the psychiatrist who was responsible for most of her childhood’s torture arranges to meet with her, she refuses to speak. At least tell him what an enormous dickfuck he is, you want to yell at the screen, but you know that would be impolite. When brought in to the police station for question, she sits in complete defiance, without answering a single question, until everybody gives up and sends her away. For godsake cooperate with these people, you want to yell, because everyone knows that you’re supposed to cooperate with the authorities.

This is shadow feminism at its finest. The ‘authorities’ you’re supposed to cooperate with have abused, assaulted, and tortured Lisbeth. The men, even the ostensibly kindest ones, who want to ‘help’ her are part of an anti-woman regime that dismantles her, that disempowers her, that determines how fuckable and therefore how worthy of their assistance she is.

We can read Lisbeth’s sullenness and silence as a simple refusal to participate in a system that has literally fucked her up the ass.

It’s a silence that should lead all of us to consider our complicity in social structures designed to work against the best interests of the poor, the nonwhite, the nonmale, the undereducated. My discomfort at Lisbeth’s refusal to answer questions at her official interrogation–that comes from a lifetime of learning how to be a good girl, how to do what the nice men ask of me. Lisbeth’s days of being a good girl are long over, and this film respects her enough to grant her that silence, to love and admire her for it.

This film loves her, but true to form, Lisbeth never offers up her gratitude to the film, its camera, or its viewers. The biggest misstep of the second film in this series was its treatment of Lisbeth and her body as an object of sexual desire. She gets all naked with her girlfriend in front of the camera’s male gaze; she walks around in bathrobes and skimpy outfits for no apparent reason and in a complete mismatch with the story being told. This film’s greatest accomplishment is that it refuses to sexualize our hero in any way that might be recognizable to the general viewing public. There is one scene near the end when Lisbeth is interrupted during a bath; though the filmmakers could’ve snuck some skin in there, we never get a single glimpse of her body and, what’s more, she emerges from the bath looking not steamy and sexy but soaked and disheveled. And here’s the piece de resistance, in the form of Lisbeth’s clothing choice for her trial:

That’s right, motherfuckers. You won’t get a single glimpse of Lisbeth’s body. She’s done with your world and everything it represents to her. We (the poor, the nonwhite, the nonmale, the undereducated) may not have the courage to make such a decision for ourselves, may not have the courage to take that path, but we must respect a film that refuses to let us think that our path is the harder one to take.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

film review: The Social Network

Oct 3rd, 10 / 1 Comment

Summary: my Facebook friends’ status updates hold more surprises in any five minutes than this film can muster in 2 hours.

As I was waiting for my friends to arrive at the movie theater for the 7:00 showing of The Social Network, the newly released film chronicling the early years of Mark Zuckerberg’s rise as the co-founder of Facebook, I accidentally got the zipper pull on my sweatshirt stuck in the mesh of the bench I was sitting on. I found this out when I stood up, felt the pull and heard a metallic *pop*.

That was the last unexpected thing that happened within my field of vision for the next two and a half hours.

This film centers around a pair of lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg, played with great subtlety and nuance by Jesse Eisenberg, for copyright infringement, intellectual property theft, and an extremely vaguely described allegation by Facebook co-founder and former Chief Financial Officer Eduardo Saverin that he was cheated out of his share of rights to the site. Guess what–Zuckerberg turns out to act like sort of an asshole, both in real life and in the movie. If you follow social media or business news, you probably knew about his reputation for dick moves in real life. In the movie, you’re notified of Zuckerberg’s assholishness in the opening scene when he launches into a horribly dickish tirade to his girlfriend about elitism, his desire to get accepted into one of Harvard’s exclusive clubs, and his struggle with distinguishing himself from his Harvard classmates despite scoring a perfect 1600 on the SAT. (The girlfriend is surprised here: “Does that mean you didn’t get anything wrong?” she asks. It’s hard to believe, incidentally, that the movie version of Zuckerberg wouldn’t have informed his girlfriend of his perfect score long before this point–as in, during the opening minutes of their first date.)

The rest of the movie is a confirmation of what the first five minutes establish: That Mark Zuckerberg–the film version of him, at least–is indeed an asshole, and that his behavior is the result of a deep need to be accepted, admired, and respected. At the risk of tossing in a spoiler, every time Zuckerberg is presented with a choice between doing the right thing and making a dick move, he chooses the dick move. Every. Single. Time. By the end of the film, Zuckerberg isn’t a more complex, more nuanced, or more tragic asshole; he’s just the exact same asshole who would brag about his perfect SAT score to his girlfriend, except with more money this time.

But don’t worry, because there are many other things to learn from this film! It turns out that nerds are people, too! And that nerds with ambitions toward world domination want the same thing that ambitious non-nerds want: Respect, power, and girls! I know–surprising, right? The Social Network is just filled with surprises exactly like this!

That the film refuses to surprise us, either with its characters or with the narrative itself, is fairly disappointing. There is, after all, a nice social critique to be made of the fact that Zuckerberg and his archrivals, the more privileged, wealthier, and better connected Winklevoss twins, orient to peers and authority figures with approximately the same degree of entitlement. It’s just that the Winklevosses wear their entitlement as if it were the skin they were born in, whereas Zuckerberg–mousy, awkward, unconnected Zuckerberg–has to constantly insist, in word and deed, upon his right to have everything he wants handed directly to him. That Zuckerberg ends up looking like the asshole while the Winklevosses end up looking like some combination of self-righteous, misguided and spoiled–well, that’s arguably at least partially the fault of a culture that uses class, education, and physical appearance to distinguish between confidence and arrogance.

Alas, this is a critique left unexplored in The Social Network, which instead spends its time showing off its witty dialogue, era-appropriate technologies, and superb acting. (This is a point mentioned by many other reviewers, but one worth noting here: The acting, by everyone in film, is so good it is simply astonishing.)

A lengthy early scene features Zuckerberg running through the streets of Cambridge, MA, and across the Harvard campus. It’s actually more of a jog than a run, and it’s really not clear why he’s running. Maybe he’s cold and wants to get indoors as quickly as possible; maybe he has a lot of homework to do; maybe he has a new programming idea he wants to try. At one point, as he’s passing a busker playing a violin, Zuckerberg slows to a walk and you think, okay, now something’s going to happen!

But nothing happens. He walks past the violinist, then picks up his pace until he’s running again. When he gets to his dorm he’s not exhausted, he’s not agitated, he’s not excited; he’s not really anything at all. He’s just…done running.

Which makes you wonder: Why in the world did I watch that whole thing? And why, for godsake why, did the filmmakers spend so much time and money putting that together, no matter how lovely and well filmed it is?

The Social Network is rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language. Also, women are treated as nameless receptacles for dicks.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

film review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire

Aug 1st, 10 / 3 Comments

Still from The Girl Who Played With Fire The Rejectionist offers a powerful and persuasive feminist critique of Stieg Larsson’s series of mysteries starring Lisbeth Salander. Actually, “critique” is probably too mild of a term; it’s more accurately a “complete smackdown.” She writes:

There are some problems with Dragon Tattoo, and let’s talk about the main one: There are a lot of dead ladies in this book. Literally: hundreds. There are other beefs I have with Dragon Tattoo, on the level of Literature: the plotting is sloppy; the sentences are decidedly unlovely; the villainous family is SO BAD they are Nazis AND serial killers (yes, plural) AND rapists (yes, plural) of their sisters/daughters/many murder victims. But the bottom line is not so much that of a Reviewer, but that of a Lady: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo creeps me the fuck out. In my gut, right there, the place that is like GET ME OUT OF HERE AND FIX ME A DRINK AND START TELLING ME ABOUT UNICORNS AND KITTENS OR SOMETHING. The novel’s original title in Swedish was Men Who Hate Women; but reading the book, you start to get the feeling it’s not a polemic so much as a manual….

People who write about dead ladies make a shit-ton of money (see: Patterson, James; Cornwell, Patricia; Koontz, Dean; &c ad nauseum). Even more people want to read about dead ladies than want to write about them; which, as a lady, stresses me out. I like murder mysteries and I like thrillers. But I am getting fucking tired of those stories revolving solely around rape and torture. Packaging that nastiness up as feminist is icing on an ugly cake. There are men who hate women: I am aware of this. Anyone who has ever tried living as a woman is aware of this. I don’t need a ten-page explicit rape scene to bring this point home; I need only to leave my house.

I have not read the novels, but I’m certain The Rejectionist’s assessment is accurate. In general, her critique holds for the film adaptation, as well: women’s mutilated bodies are paraded across the screen like cattle at the 4-H fair; women are in constant danger at the hands of men; and Lisbeth is victimized so frequently and so brutally that she seems to accept her role as victim even while she is fighting back.

ON THE OTHER HAND:

Lisbeth, we learn, lives her life at the mercy of men–men who hate her, men who are simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to her, men who want to humiliate and control her. This is, as The Rejectionist points out, not an uncommon theme in the real world, either; men who hate women exist, and they exist in great number; and they will, if given the chance, wield their hatred against any woman they can. This is simply a fact of life for Lisbeth, and has been since her childhood. And yet–this is the important part, so pay attention–and yet she forges a life of her own choosing anyway.

Lisbeth has been declared mentally incompetent, which means she is given a guardian who has the legal right to make all decisions for her. Lisbeth’s guardians are men; and in the opening scenes of Dragon Tattoo we learn that her newest guardian does, indeed, hate women. He immediately demonstrates that she is at his mercy by taking total control of her finances and declaring that he will give her a small allowance for living expenses. Yet she finds a way–watch the movie to find out how–to take back some control, to gain access to her finances, which to her, equates to her (relative) freedom.

Lisbeth is commonly physically attacked by men, who see her as an easy victim because she is small and looks vulnerable. She simultaneously accepts her victimization as a fact of her life and resists her victimization, not only physically fighting back but throwing up the very landscape of her body as a carefully guarded terrain. She wears black; she has pierced her face; she holds her lips pinched closed. Men who hate women may very well invade, but they will know that they are not welcome; and if they invade she will resist with every last inch of herself.

Lisbeth is a woman who is at the mercy of men who hate women, and yet without breaking free completely of these men–that would be unrealistic–she finds a way to craft an independent life, to make choices about how to live, to extend the walls of her cage. That may not be the kind of feminism that makes us feel good–it may leaves us wanting to wash our eyes out with mouthwash–but to refuse to call it empowerment is to refuse to acknowledge the empowerment tactics of millions of women for whom men who hate women and also have total control over women is a constant, inescapable fact.

There you have it: the film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo offers a complicated example of a sort of shadow feminism.

I do not feel the same about the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

cover art for The Girl Who Played With Fire In this film, the hero Lisbeth Salander, whose very body is a fortress designed to turn away men who hate women…well, in this film, the body of Lisbeth Salander is offered up for the camera to devour with its emphatically male gaze. In her first appearance in the film, Lisbeth is naked with her back turned to the camera. The camera takes the opportunity to travel down her dragon tattoo-decorated back, over her tan lines and down her backside before heading back up again. There’s a sex scene early on which pairs Lisbeth up with a hot Asian chick; the scene is dutifully recorded in minute detail by the voyeuristic camera, which hovers to one side like a guy just waiting for his chance to jump in.

This sort of thing peppers the movie, breaking up the lengthy graphic scenes in which women are brutalized by men until they are rescued by other men. And then, of course, there is the half-hearted attempt at social commentary, with a plotline about journalists investigating a sex trafficking story in which girls and young women are sold into slavery and subjected to the whims of–you guessed it–men who hate women. The young reporter who breaks the story explains that these girls can’t hope for protection from the law because “they’re just not a priority.”

When the police start poking around, the journalists decide not to hand over their research because, as the editor Mikael Blomqvist explains, the lives of the young women may be placed in danger, and they must be protected at all costs. It’s a nice gesture, but sort of contradicted by the fact that as soon as this plot point serves its purpose (which is to put Lisbeth in danger at the hands of even more powerful men who hate women), the plight of the trafficked young women is completely dropped, never to appear again. It’s almost as if they’re just not a priority to the producers of this film.

Who cares, right? It’s just a movie. It’s just entertainment. Feminists need to loosen up, right? Why does it even matter?

I saw The Girl Who Played With Fire with five friends whose physical appearances announce, more or less, that they will not be at the mercy of any man, thank you very much, least of all men who hate women. We’re talking shaved heads. We’re talking tattoos. We’re talking long strides taken in comfortable shoes.

As I walked with my friends to our seats, I saw a young man watching us. After we passed his row, I watched him lean over to his girlfriend, whisper in her ear, and point to us.

“How do you know what he was saying to her?” one of my friends asked when I told them later about this dude. I know; I just know. I could tell by how he was watching us. I could tell by the dickish little smile pasted across his smug little face.

And that’s why it matters.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

the sleeping alone review of films: Surrogates (2009)

Jul 2nd, 10 / 0 Comments

summary: I liked it better when it was District 9; I, Robot; and the middle third of The Matrix. And I didn’t really like District 9 or I, Robot all that much.

The 2009 film Surrogates wonders what might happen if we started letting technology do the living for us. It creates a world in which war is treated as a video game, physical characteristics are treated as malleable, and real-life human interaction is treated as an oddity.

Boy, that sure would be a terrifying existence, wouldn’t it? I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live in that world.

Ahem.

Surrogates stars Bruce Willis as The Good Cop Wracked With Guilt Over the Death of His Son. He mentions his son’s death about 20 different times over the course of the movie, and also, judging by the surprised reaction of his partner at the first mention, has never once mentioned his son’s death before the start of the film. It also turns out that the invention of surrogates (which are basically what you think they are, so I won’t bother explaining) could have prevented his son’s death, so you can think of him as a sort of monosyllabic Dr. McCoy.

There’s a conspiracy. The surrogates aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. And not everyone who seems like a good guy ends up acting like a good guy.

Why, oh why, do we have to put up with only one really original action flick every year or two? I don’t know if I’m just getting cranky in my old age, but it seems like forever since I’ve seen a mainstream action film that really blew me away. I did really enjoy Live Free or Die Hard (2007), also starring a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet Bruce Willis; I thought War of the Worlds (2005) was pretty neat, loaded as it was with the dynamic combo of killer special effects and an emotionally harrowing plot. But it’s been a dry run since then. I haven’t seen Iron Man 2 yet. Christopher Nolan’s Inception, due out mid-July, looks pretty good. But if I had a dollar for every movie I waited for with joyous expectation, only to leave the theater feeling swindled, I’d be a rich, rich man.

Surrogates (2009) stars Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, and Boris Kodjoe, with appearances by James Cromwell and Ving Rhames. It’s rated PG-13 and contains some violence, mild profanity, and a brand of when-I-was-your-age nostalgia that nobody under 13 should be forced to endure.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

the sleeping alone review of films: Robin Hood (2010)

May 23rd, 10 / 1 Comment

summary: I liked it better when it played as Braveheart, The Patriot, Lord of the Rings, and Saving Private Ryan.

I wondered after watching the new Robin Hood if there was ever a point during filming when someone slipped up and accidentally referred to Russell Crowe’s character as William Wallace instead of as Robin. It’s also entirely possible that someone accidentally referred to Cate Blanchett’s Marion as “Eowyn”–dye Blanchett’s hair blond and you have a dead ringer for Miranda Otto’s version of the handsome noblewoman-warrior of Middle Earth.

I swear to you that there were even hobbits before this film’s end.

And that’s not all: There was a beach-storming mission, complete with what appears to be the exact same landing craft props used in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. There were villagers locked by soldiers in a burning building: All of the smoke and fire, with none of the crisis of conscience or emotional gravity played out the first time around in The Patriot!

This version of Robin Hood is presented as a prequel, focusing on the details of the lives of Robin and his Merry Men leading up to their days as outlaws. Usually a prequel tells a different story than the one you already know, but this version of Robin Hood doesn’t tell you much you didn’t already learn from watching the previous 7,000 versions of the Robin Hood story. And of course, any details that are new to the Robin Hood canon are cribbed from the movies I listed above and probably a few other films that I haven’t thought of yet.

The hobbits rode ponies when it was time to do battle with King John’s orcs.

It does make a valiant attempt to be epic, and it does this primarily by plunking down sweeping shots of the English countryside accompanied by orchestral music. These scenes are, as you can probably imagine, completely gratuitous; they serve absolutely no purpose except perhaps as proof that, unlike the vast majority of epic films, this one was filmed in the actual region where the story takes place.

Bully for them, I guess. But as director Ridley Scott ought to know by now, authentic scenery doesn’t equal an authentic story. An authentic story–an epic–is achieved through authentic details put together in a way that engages, surprises, and moves the audience. Homer knew this, which is why he had Achilles chain Hector up by the ankles and drag him in circles around the city. Tolkien knew this, which is why he had the smallest, simplest characters of his story raise themselves up to giants’ height. And Peter Jackson knew how to pay homage to the epics that came before LOTR, including but not limited to Tolkien’s trilogy itself, and still surprise and move us through the choices he made in adapting the story to the screen.

Ridley Scott knows something about how to tell a good story, as he showed in The Gladiator, ~~the Alien trilogy,~~ Alien,* and Thelma & Louise. And you might argue that these films are, at least to some extent, epics in their own right. But these films succeed on the strength of their characters, and because we care about the characters we care about their struggles against overwhelming odds. But epics generally tell a story through the characters that’s larger than any single character–you might say that the primary character of the epic story is the story itself. Scott has not done as well in his attempts to tell this sort of story, as Kindom of Heaven and, now, Robin Hood attest.

I don’t know: Maybe I’m quibbling here in my attempt to divide a good character-driven film from a good epic-driven film. I’m just trying to understand why a director who is as good at making films as Ridley Scott is can still come up with a film as gloriously, clunkily terrible as Robin Hood. If we can figure out what makes him fail, then we can just get together and tell him to stop making that kind of movie and keep making the kind of movie that proves his cinematic brilliance. Let Bartlet be Bartlet, I always say.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37bbj8HbM5I&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

Robin Hood (2010) stars Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, and—oddly enough–Max von Sydow. It’s rated PG-13 and contains some violence, mild sexual content, and a storyline so plodding that anyone under 13 is not likely to be willing to sit through the whole 2 hours and 20 minutes.

*Correction, 5/24/10, 8:40 a.m.: As Andres G. points out in the comments below this post, Ridley Scott was responsible for only the first film of the Alien trilogy.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

the sleeping alone review of films: And Then Came Lola

Feb 3rd, 10 / 0 Comments

summary: I have a big problem with this movie.

I’ve been sitting on a review of And Then Came Lola (2010), described in press materials as a “time-bending, comedic and sexy lesbian romp-loosely inspired by the art house classic Run Lola Run,” since it showed at Bloomington’s Pride Film Festival last weekend. On the one hand, yay! This film presents a welcome antivenin to the cultural poison of heterosexual action-romances, romantic comedies, action-comedic romances, thriller-romances, romantic melodramas…you get the idea. On the other hand…well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

The story is much more than loosely inspired by Run Lola Run, the 1998 German film that has a fire-haired Lola desperate to get 10,000 Deutsche Mark in 20 minutes in order to save her boyfriend’s life. The conceit of this film is that when Lola fails, she gets to try again: shot by a police officer and dying on the sidewalk, she yells “stop” and starts over, armed with an awareness of what went wrong the first time. As the story resets itself again and again, the audience is offered backstory: Lola’s relationship with Manni, her boyfriend, is not fully secure; there are doubts about whether each feels a genuine love for the other. There is a question, then, over why Lola would risk her life, again and again.

And Then Came Lola works with several of the plot points of its inspiration, not least of which is the main character’s ability to go back in time and try again. As in Run Lola Run, there is a punk with a dog; there is a homeless man; there is a beautiful woman named Lola and a camera that cannot look away from her as she runs through the streets of her city. This time, though, Lola is a photographer running through the streets of San Francisco to deliver prints to her girlfriend, Casey, who needs them right away in order to secure a Big Client. Beneath this is a backstory: Lola has issues with commitment, has issues with being dependable and on time, but thinks that Casey might be The One and wants to prove that she can change. As in Run Lola Run, this Lola needs multiple tries to secure the happy ending.

And Then Came Lola is basically a lesbian retelling of Run Lola Run, which isn’t in itself a bad thing. In this version, every character is gay (or gay-curious, as in the mixed-sex tourist couple who invite Lola to share their taxi and then put the moves on her), and the film starts from an assumption that same-sex romances are neither perfect nor fundamentally much different from heterosexual romances. And thank god for that–it’s about time we started moving beyond the startpoint of needing to justify same-sex attraction and romance.

On the other hand, for a lesbian action-romance, And Then Came Lola feels pretty heteronormative. First of all, the main characters are beautiful in a way that most straight men could probably get behind. Here are Lola and Casey, played by Ashleigh Sumner and Jill Bennett:

I don’t challenge the notion that some lesbians look like Lola and Casey (and, in fact, the actors made an appearance at the showing I attended, and they look about the same in real life as they do in the film*). But I do have a problem with a film that aligns femininity with heroism and turns anything else into comedy. In this relationship, it’s Lola who’s the problem–she’s emotionally distant and because of this, as one character explains, sex with her is “like sex with a man.” In order to get the girl, Lola has to learn to access her feelings; her big breakthrough comes when she can no longer have sex with Casey without knowing if Casey loves her.

This film is pretty overtly about sex, and its plot is pushed forward through presentation of sexual fantasy. In their fantasy, Lola and Casey get romance, with candles, caresses, and glasses of wine. They are therefore the heroes of the story.

Here are the villains: The punk with a dog is a little butch lesbian who trips Lola up again and again and, it’s revealed, has a disturbingly close relationship with her dog. The most evil villain of the movie is a lesbian parking officer, who’s presented as a fat, disheveled Latina. She’s ugly, we’re told, and also mouthy; and her fantasies are therefore presented as hilarious. They’re offered up as a joke, as comic relief.

It’s not enough, not anymore, to make films with tons of gay characters. What we need is films with tons of gay characters that also strive to complicate our understanding of sexuality, attraction, romance, and what it means to be human. And Then Came Lola would have us believe that the stereotypes are correct, that the more traditionally beautiful you are, the more right you have to your sexuality. That’s not only blatantly wrong, it’s deeply problematic, especially for a film making the rounds at LGBTQ film festivals.

*Note: I’m making a fairly big leap in assuming that Sumner and / or Bennett are gay, when it’s entirely possible that both are straight. If they are, that doesn’t negate the fact that there are plenty of lesbians who are approximately as heteronormatively beautiful as Sumner and Bennett are.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

on homophobia, classism, and the politics of rape: Don Belton and Bloomington’s Pride Film Festival

Jan 30th, 10 / 0 Comments

I want to talk about Don Belton.

Belton, you may remember, was the Indiana University professor who was found stabbed to death in his home on Christmas day. He was the gay Indiana University professor; his killer, ex-Marine Michael Griffin, has not only confessed but has explained his motive for stabbing Belton:

The former military man told police that Belton, who was openly gay, sexually assaulted him in front of his girlfriend, while they were both intoxicated on Christmas Day. And because the assistant professor of English refused to “show remorse,” Griffin stabbed him to death, according to court documents.

Bloomington’s LGBTQ community was hit fairly hard by the news of Belton’s death. In part, this is because Belton was well liked; and in part, this is because the killing repeats the old message that nobody wants to be reminded of: It’s (still) not safe to be gay in America.

A web site was built and called “Justice for Don Belton.” Vigils were held. Press releases (here, here) were circulated mourning Belton’s death and noting the loss to the IU community. And this year’s Pride Film Festival, an annual LGBTQ event held in downtown Bloomington, has been dedicated to Belton’s memory.

All of this for someone who has officially been identified as a perpetrator of sexual assault.

If this were a hetero situation, and the killer were a woman who claimed to have killed a man after two incidents of sexual assault, there would be no vigils. There would be no websites. There would be no film festival dedicated to the dead man’s memory. And rightly so: After centuries of struggle, we have finally started to evolve into a society that does its best to side with the alleged victim in cases of sexual assault. We aren’t a society that does its very best, of course, and you know, we sort of keep having to have the same conversation every time it comes up: Rape is not about sex. It’s about power. And women who accuse a man of literal rape have been subjected to metaphorical rape by a court system that embraces a blame-the-victim mentality. And so on. But we’re trying, and we’re getting better at having these conversations.

And of course this isn’t a hetero situation, and the gender, power, and sex issues don’t map. We pretty much don’t believe that Belton was a rapist or that Griffin was a victim; we believe–and, to be clear, I believe–that Belton was brutally murdered, and that the motive was homophobia. Homosexuality is a deep threat to heteronormative culture, to the status quo. It’s dangerous and terrifying and the most insecure among us believe it must be blotted out. With violence, if needs be.

Belton’s death is a reminder that no matter how far we’ve come, we’re still a society that cannot guarantee the safety of its marginalized members. Bloomington was recently named America’s 4th gayest city by the Advocate, which confuses me but let’s go with it for now. And this year’s Pride Festival,
which is deploying at the Buskirk-Chumley theater this very weekend, has drawn hundreds, if not thousands, of beautiful, joyous, and celebratory LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly community members. But all it takes is misreading one person, or showing up at the wrong bar at the wrong time, or acting a little too gay, or even just holding your partner’s hand in public; and the Great Lie starts to unravel. It’s not safe to be gay in America. It’s not even always acceptable to be gay in America.

This isn’t to say the reaction of the LGBTQ community to Belton’s death is completely ick-free. There is the issue of classism. Part of the reason we don’t believe Griffin is that Belton was so cultured. He was well educated. He was a writer. He was a professor, for godsake. He couldn’t have possibly raped someone. I mean, just look at his picture:

Here’s Griffin, an ex-Marine, 23 years old:

Leaving aside issues of race–not because I think we should leave those issues aside, but because I’m not qualified to talk about race–we craft a narrative around Belton and Griffin, and it’s a narrative that points to deep class assumptions that hover above issues of gender and sexual orientation. It’s the same sort of narrative that frames, for example, the story of Tiger Woods and his multiple mistresses (“Cocktail waitresses! Pancake servers! Why’s Tiger rooting around in the trash?!?”), our attitudes toward celebrities (“Britney Spears–you can take the girl out of Hicksville, but….”), and the political decisions that undergird our social structure.

It’s easier and simpler to use Belton’s murder as a touchstone for conversations about the state of gay rights in America. In fact, this story, like all stories worth telling, is far more complicated and multithreaded. Like all stories worth telling, the work of interpreting the details is far less clearcut than it seems upon first blush.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

the sleeping alone review of films: Avatar (3D)

Jan 4th, 10 / 2 Comments

Originally posted at http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com.

summary: holy effing effety eff.

Avatar 3D: Holy effing effety eff. That is all.

Click here to find showtimes for Avatar at a theater near you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized

the sleeping alone review of films: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Jan 4th, 10 / 0 Comments

Originally posted at <a href="http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com/2010/01/sleeping-alone-review-of-films-curious.html" target="_blank"http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com.

summary: Just cut out the middle man and watch Forrest Gump instead.

It’s a strange but true fact that I’m far more likely to post a review of a film I didn’t like than I am to post one of a film I enjoyed. There are, she protests, lots of reasons for this, but that’s a blogpost for another day. Right now I just want to tell you why The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is such a bad, bad movie.

I finally climbed aboard the Benjamin Button bandwagon in the dead week between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Since I’m not all that into wistful, you-can-do-it love stories, I was mainly motivated by a desire to see how the filmmakers dealt with the movie’s main conceit: A protagonist who ages backward, Mearth-style.

To the film’s credit, it refuses to shy away from the most potentially ridiculous aspects of this conceit. It’s as brazen in pointing an old-man-baby at the camera as it is in presenting, near the end of the film, a literally baby-faced old man. It does appear that we’re getting better at artificially aging people, too: Benjamin, played with consistent age-appropriate physicality by Brad Pitt, never once looks like a young, handsome man coated in plastic, which is what we’ve come to expect from any prematurely aged actors after decades of bad special effects. When the 20-something (but 60-ish-looking) Benjamin has an affair with a 40-something woman, he is depicted pitch-perfectly as a thin-haired, disheveled and declining man whose smile belies a boyish inner youth. The affair, and those that follow with comparatively younger women, seem to flow naturally from the radiance, youth, and energy that shine from Benjamin’s eyes and smile, if not his skin.

If you set aside the special effects, though, there isn’t much left. The plot is assembled around so many layers of unnecessary meta-story that the resulting mass of MacGuffins end up feeling like a combination of pointless distractions and the unfortunate side effects of a poorly adapted novel. There’s an ancient lady dying in a hospital as a major hurricane threatens its landfall. There’s the woman’s prodigal daughter, who has apparently returned home at the last minute to say her goodbyes. There’s a blind clockmaker, white, who marries a black Creole woman and whose only son is killed in a far-off war, and who therefore decides to build a clock that runs backward. He gives a short speech about wanting to turn time backwards, then he disappears, god knows why. There’s the black woman who raises Benjamin as her son, and who spends her entire working life employed at a retirement home, god knows why. And there’s a diary, penned by Benjamin Button, which is introduced as his Last Will and Testament. God knows why.

Now: organize all of the above details in order of novelty and interest, then cross off all but the two or three most boring and clichéd and you end up with the only details that actually end up mattering. Then, on top of the hot mess that presents itself as plot, there’s a lengthy and confusing mini-story wherein Benjamin travels by tugboat to Russia, meets a British woman whose husband is a spy, kind of falls in love with the woman and, it appears, carries on a kind of tepid affair of indeterminate length that ends for a vague set of reasons. The sole purpose of this entire intermission appears to be to shoehorn Tilda Swinton into the cast. Which, fair enough. But as my mom put it, It’s…kind of a long movie as it is.

So there you have it: Cool-ish special effects; confusing, slow, overcomplicated and irritatingly intricate plot. Add one more negative: In this film, people are treated as nameless diversions, as things that happen to people to advance the story. Early in the movie, an elderly resident of the old people’s home tells Benjamin “We’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?”

Not only is the quote itself inane–love is deepened and refined by the inevitability of loss, but saying we’re meant to lose people so we may know how much we love them is putting the cart miles before the horse–but the movie doesn’t even care to try to bear this limp aphorism out. Characters come and go, flowing through Benjamin’s life like a river, and it’s never clear that the loss of any one of them is any more painful to him than the loss of any other. In fact, Benjamin seems to actively avoid developing deep relationships with people, and at a crucial moment he even walks away from someone he loves instead of having to deal with loss. Indeed, Benjamin himself muses that “It’s funny how sometimes the people we remember the least make the greatest impression on us.” In what universe could that even be possible?

This is a movie that wants it both ways: It wants us to believe that our lives are characterized by the people we love deeply, and it wants us to believe that our lives are characterized by how they are shaped by the people who flow across our paths like buffeting wind–all of them different and finally the same, not a one distinct from any other.

In the end, though, Benjamin Button‘s biggest crime is that it tries too hard to be Forrest Gump. But Gump did it better: neater special effects, tighter plot, better character development. And lest Forrest be accused of treating people like nameless diversions, I offer the following: Forrest’s excuse was his IQ. And besides, no matter how Forrest thought of the people who flowed through his life, there was always, for him, Jenny. We love Forrest, we root for him, because he loves Jenny, he pines for Jenny, he comes up with ways to pass the time until he can see Jenny again. Benjamin has Daisy, who this film would very much like to convince us is the deep and lasting, abiding love of his life. But at the risk of spoiling the movie, she’s really not. She’s another diversion, another way to pass the time, another thing that happens to Benjamin. We’re supposed to believe that Benjamin is the hero of the story, but in fact Daisy proves herself to be strong, resilient, flawed but kind. In other words, she’s complex and layered, like all good movie heroes should be. Benjamin is flat and shiny, kind of like…a button, I suppose.

Daisy might very well be more of a hero than Jenny, but Benjamin is no Forrest. And this film, despite what you may have heard to the contrary, is not Oscar material.

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized