disjointed thoughts about Things (do not attempt to connect)
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- o the thing about me is that i will turn my nose up at any amount of schmaltz, but i cannot resist movies that contain:
- copious amounts of ocean
- Amanda Seyfried.so last night, to my eternal shame, I went to see Dear John, which was this…. oh, LJ. “disaster of white male privilege” is the best thing i can come up with. The big ****spoiler**** is
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HEY, YOU GUYS, LET’S TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH THIS YEAR’S OSCAR NOMS SUCK!
*Best Picture 2010 nominations list*
- Avatar <-- racist, imperialist white liberal guilt fantasy (everyone, native peoples, mountains, animals, trees and tree-nerve-endings, get exploited by white people, awesome!!)
- The Blind Side <-- i haven't seen this, but true story notwithstanding the trailer just me cringe. It really, really seemed like a smug white liberal guilt fantasy to me. Would those who have seen it agree, or no? eta: really interesting thread about the complications of the blind side v/s the original book.
- District 9 <-- I LOATHE THIS MOVIE. I saw it, opening night, in a theatre literally surrounded by 20-something fanboys creaming themselves in glee, while I cringed, winced, gritted my teeth in rage at the, raise your hand if you saw this coming, white liberal guilt fantasy at work disguised as yet another racist smug pretentious violent white-guy “the enemy is us” “oh no, war is bad! violence is bad! let’s impress this somber point upon you with lots of cool explosions and flying body parts!” piece of CRAP war movie you’ve seen 80000 times before. Or, as my friend’s friend said, “People keep making District 9 out to be about apartheid and it’s totally not. It’s just a fucking cool sci-fi movie. Shit blows up, it’s awesome.” MY RAGE. eta: salient arguments about what this movie did/did not do successfully being raised in comments. eta: omg made an awesome defense/critique of D9 and there are great points both for/against this movie both in post and comments! \o/
- An Education <-- ok i know nothing about this one.
- The Hurt Locker <-- or this one, although from everything i've heard, it seems like a smug pretentious violent white-guy "the enemy is us" war movie you've seen 80000 times before. (eta: Hurt Locker has a female director; in my (woefully uninformed) opinion, having a female director doesn’t mean that it’s not implicitly a male narrative.)
- Inglourious Basterds <-- thank goodness this film is.... another smug pretentious violent white-guy "the enemy is us" "oh no, war is bad! violence is bad! let's impress this somber point upon you with lots of cool explosions and flying body parts!" war movie you've seen 80000 times before. eta: some great defenses of this film (esp. its female protag) in comments, and discussion of it as Jewish revenge fantasy.
- Precious <-- ...wow. how did a film this gutsy and honest wind up in this trashcan full of garbage? (eta: a number of people have said they are wary of placing this film in the "totally non-problematic" arena and I am as well; however I still think this film's voice was one of the more important ones we heard this year.) (son of eta: article summing up Ishmael Reed’s take on why Precious‘ portrayal of black men and whites is problematic.)
- A Serious Man <-- ok i know nothing about this one. (eta: and i *love* the Coens but... they pretty much stick to boy stories. Which is not a problem 100% of the time! but, again, this list is full of boy stories.)
- Up <-- ...i love this film. i love so, so much about it and saw it repeatedly in theatres. but it is completely, start to finish, a 100% non-diverse (eta: apparently Russell is Asian-American? I DID NOT KNOW THIS) boy’s movie, about boy quests and boy dreams. or, though it pains me to admit it, Pixar, you have a gender problem.
- Up in the Air <-- i started to see this film tonight. half an hour in, the main character had insulted and smugly corrected a spunky young female corporate n00b, because we all know we love watching spunky girls get told. He also advises her to "stereotype, it saves time." And then just when I thought it might actually pass the Bechdel test, we not only had 2 girls talking about men, but the line, "I don't want to be anti-feminist, I mean, I appreciate what your generation did for us, but sometimes I wonder what's the point of it all if I don't have a man?" - at which point i walked out and just went to see sherlock holmes for the zillionth time again instead.* GOOD JOB, MALE SCREENWRITERS.
eta: re Up in the Air, It looks like I apparently really stopped watching too soon to characterize this film; I reserve the right to walk out of a theatre if a film twigs my three-strikes-and-you’re-out gut feeling; but I may give this one another try, if only because Starla is using her “god you are so uncool” icons at me.
And this is the result of teaching film students to ignore the bechdel test. A star-studded lineup reitering the SAME FALSE HOLLOW FEEL-GOOD CRAP about violence, war, power dynamics, and WHITE GUYS. I just want something different. As I said to Eddy six months ago, I’m just so sick of seeing the same rehashed themes for white guys, over and over and over again in film. blaaaah I just want something totally brand new!!!! And I think it’s probably obvious which outsider longshot I want to win the Oscars this year.
What about those films up there I haven’t seen? Or even better yet, what about the ones I have? LET’S TALK. OR RANT PLAYFULLY. OR DEBATE. I’m probably overlooking good, important points in the films above, so please, if you love one of these films, feel free to say so. These things are complicated and that’s why they’re worth talking about. 
(but my replies may be a while, it’s rly late here, bedtime!)
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* also, for the record, for all i love and adore the new sherlock holmes, it bears repeating that it is yet another white guy film. it is racist (minorities are either bad guy thugs fighting holmes and getting bested by watson’s bullets, or else non-existent), ableist (dwarf jokes? really?), misogynist (oh, irene), and homophobic. i love it for what it does right despite all these things, and for the fact that it’s never made me wince or cringe in rage as often as most of the films on this list have in the last year.
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tl;dr version of this post: NEEDS MOAR
(not that Whip It doesn’t have its own share of problematic elements, but it does have girl power? meep?)
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Harry Potter & the Hot-Blooded Prince of Slytherin ™
Have seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 3 and 3/4 times now, in theatres. Not counting the skim-throughs of the avi while I screencap moments where Harry and Draco GLARE! At! Each! Other! to show sjkf;asd;j in order to convince her that
a) yes, Harry and Draco are still snarling and angry and obsessed
b) yes, Harry and Draco are still in love
c) yes, Harry Potter and HP fandom and HP canon is still is KIND OF AMAZING AND IT’S OKAY TO LOVE IT
(look, i am telling you, those are some powerful screencaps.)
fine, don’t take my word for it! HERE IS
Read MoreTerminator: Salvation (say hello to your toy, your 21st Century boy)
I literally just saw the very first Terminator movie this month, about 3 weeks ago, as a response to the clamor over SCC (which I haven’t seen either). So maybe I’m just in the mood for this, but I wanted to give a shout-out to Terminator: Salvation. I saw it last night, and I thought it was fantastic, absolutely fantastic.
It was gritty and loud and violent and apocalyptic and dark, without becoming so consumed in its own misery and/or bloodlust that it became desensitized. In fact it was completely the opposite: while I was watching it I kept thinking about (bear with me here and also can I just say damn that man is brilliant) Jacob’s American Idol recap which Kara shared with me here, which basically talks about how Kris and Adam emblify a new guy code, showing us the man of the future: a new version of manhood that reconciles traditional John Wayne-liness with a modern metrosexual aesthetic, and pull it all together into something that is real and sensitive and honest, without losing any of the strength associated with masculinity itself.
On one level the rise of the “bromance” depicts this in an overly earnest way. But it’s also all over this movie, and it really struck me, probably because hell, Adam Lambert just lost yesterday and goddammit I spent all day reading every American Idol boyfic I could find on intimations.org, and nothing says bromance louder than men hugging each other and singing, ahhh, so maybe I am just slapping this interpretation onto Terminator, but dude. This is a movie where men almost quite literally wear their hearts on the outside. And symbolically, what that says about cultural shifts in the depiction of masculinity really gelled with what Jacob says: So one of these decisions I came to as a boy was that unicorns were, like my Dad, the best possible option for what being a man actually looked like. Because you have to be able to do both: be strong and fuck things up if necessary, but also capable of holding your son or daughter in your lap, or crying, also when necessary. …You have to be both things all the time if you can ever hope to stay whole, and the trick is being present enough to stay in control of that, and not get lazy enough to ever be one or the other entirely. How to be strong without turning cold, tough but tender. Soft, but not fragile.
This is not to say that the movie itself is not problematic in the way all action movies are, with a McCarthy-esque “the only way out is through violence” postapocalyptica, with the “badass female = women being violent like men” characterizations that forever plague us, while the rest of the female “types” – the earth mothers, healers, and peacemakers, are pretty much given cursory nods and then swept aside completely. But on the whole, I really loved that this movie suggests that humanity’s salvation is at least partially contingent upon a new, unicorn-encompassing definition of masculinity.
The other thing I want to note about Terminator is how fabulous it looked. Part of it is that I am a total sucker for that gray-green bled-out Supernatural-ish filter McG loves so well, but the rest is just that the CGI was seamless, everyone was doing their own stunts, and the camera-work and the cinametography overall were fantastic.
It did, and I bought it. 100%. So. Dude! If you see it, please write me John Connor/Marcus Wright come talk to me about it.
this post has no point, but it’s long anyway!
Read More“Why’s he picking on me? He’s always picking on me! why don’t you pick on her some time?!”
NCIS, ep 402: Every time Tony makes a reference in this show to The Fugitive, my heart grows three sizes. Especially when he says things like, “so that makes me Joey Pants.” My flaily love for this movie, my flaily love for Tommy Lee Jones as Sam Gerard, my flaily love for Joe Pantoliano as Cosmo Renfro, and now my flaily love for Tony DiNozzo’s flaily love for all these things, they are overwhelming me. Oh, and last episode it was The Usual Suspects!!!!! seriously, it is like Tony is pyschically connected to my brain, or at the very least, my requests, it’s kind of creepy. And I have to say that while the show still bugs me on a number of political levels (though since kate left it’s gotten better), I cannot really find fault with writers who have now recycled the plot of The Fugitive not once but two times. I’m waiting for them to have an ep where Gibbs has to keep Tony from falling for some social-climbing tart, and at the end the two of them return to work on the boat in Gibbs’ basement, and Tony goes, oh, of course! and starts babbling on about how this is like The Philadelphia Story, and then pesters the boss into acknowledging that Tony might, perhaps, if they can ever get the boat out of the basement, prove to be yar. <3
omg I really need to go rewatch the Fugitive now. yay for three-day holiday weekends and nothing to do. 
is it hideously dorky that i’ve started compiling a list of Tony DiNozzo’s Must-Watch Films? Oh, hell, even if it is, it’s all about an excuse to put The Quiet Man and Weekend at Bernie’s on the same list.
eta: ep 403 (slashy spoiler):
Read MoreProtected: 1,001 movies.
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Protected: It’s just the bolognese!
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