Fan Fatales

Favorites From 2011

2011-12-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

It seems like every New Year's I find myself reflecting on the more grueling aspects of the past twelve months and looking forward with a cautious hope that the next twelve will take a sharp upturn. This proves more about my disposition than the events of the average year, but even in the midst of everything as it was happening I was aware that by and large, 2011 has been a particularly crappy year for me and most of the people I know. There have been some good things, of course, and my classes and education have been a large part of that. Even as much as I will be more than happy to see the end of this particular year, there's a part of me that remembers all the past years I've said the same thing (including the end of 2010) only to have the following year be worse than the previous one in pretty monumental ways. Still, nothing lasts forever, including the disappointments, embarrassments, failures and personal tragedies, so one of these years my oath to have a better year will finally come to fruition. That's the thing about this holiday; it's all about optimism and hoping that the big wheel you're on will swing around again and give you a break from the mire you've been working so hard to slog through. So here's hoping that 2012 turns out to be a little kinder than its predecessor was. Or if nothing else, that it'll still give us some great moments in the midst of it all.

In the meantime, I'd like to close out this year remembering my favorite movies and shows from the past go around the sun. Not necessarily the best or most innovative things, just my favorites, for whatever reason.

Halfway Out of the Dark

2011-12-17T05:26:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is once more upon us, prompting much retrospective contemplation over the events and the media from the past year. Once again I feel ill-equipped to provide any sort of educated list of the best movies that have come out as there are so many people providing them that have had much more opportunity to see a great variety. The majority of the things I've seen have been through classes or my Netflix account so I'm pretty out of the loop in terms of what's current. Instead I've decided to brush off a few of my favorite old chestnuts and take a look at a few things I'm looking forward to seeing in the coming year. (Hopefully I'll see them, at any rate. I still haven't seen many of the films on my "looking forward to it" list from the last time I did this exercise.)

First off, it just wouldn't be the holiday season if I weren't nose-deep in Christopher Moore's hilariously blasphemous novel The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. Having read nearly all of Moore's writing (save for his last few books I've been too buried under school work to get to), this one shot to the top of my favorites for two reasons: it's one of his funniest and it's a giant crossover. I love crossovers to the pit of my sickly fangirl heart and this is a doozy. Taking place in Pine Cove, CA it combines at least one character from nearly every book he'd written up until that point, save for a few that just wouldn't fit in. It stands well enough on its own legs, providing enough back story for everyone so new readers wouldn't be too lost without bogging things down for the people already familiar with them. It's the one book I go out of my way to re-read every year-- eggnog just doesn't taste the same unless I'm reading about a broadsword-slinging former B-movie actress, her stoner constable husband, an angel who wants to be Spider-Man, a pilot with a talking fruit bat, and a group of zombies obsessed with DIY Swedish furniture. Like everything Moore writes, there's a biting ribbon of dark humor underlying the surface-level silliness-- there's considerably more homicide, cover-up, blackmail, mental illness, recreational drug use, middle-aged romance and zombie attacks than your traditional Christmas story-- so it's more like an interesting cross between black comedy and broad slapstick. If it sounds like your cup of tea, I'd highly recommend picking a copy up if your shopping takes you anywhere near a bookstore.

There also seems to be talk of a movie adaptation in the works which might be interesting provided they can get that pesky tone right. According to Movie Insider the cast includes Milla Jovovich, Crispin Glover and Cloris Leachman so it sounds like they're on the right track. (Personally I think Alex Skarsgard would have made a pretty good Archangel Raziel since he's tall, blond, ridiculously gorgeous and able to do mind-bendingly stupid and uncomfortably inhuman with a straight face. But that's just me.)

The Doctor Who Christmas Special from 2010 is a recent but most likely permanent addition to my annual tradition. The title of this blog entry is taken from the opening and closing narration of Michael Gambon in this very cleverly self-conscious retelling of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, only in addition to the familiar bah-humbugging miser learning how to not be miserable it also features time travel, a crashing spaceship, a frozen opera singer, the most sympathetic celluloid shark possibly ever, and a very cool bow tie. Setting aside my ardent adoration for anything that shows a shark to be anything other than evil or terrifying, this is still a really smart, witty, funny, touching production that I cannot recommend highly enough. But seriously, sharks and time travel, come on.

The Hudsucker Proxy isn't one of the Coens' more highly praised movies but it's definitely one of my favorites. It's a tip of the hat to Frank Capra and the screwball comedies of the 30s, featuring some beautiful cinematography, a snappy script and some fantastic performances from Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman. Also keep an eye out for John Mahoney, Bruce Campbell, Peter Gallagher and the late Anna Nicole Smith. Considering the economic climate over the past few years, maybe a good laugh at the antics of big corporations shooting themselves in the foot is something everyone could use. I've seen this movie too many times to count over the years and it never ceases to be fun. It's also currently streaming on Netflix, so if you have an account check it out.

Tokyo Godfathers, along with anything else the late (and still sorely missed) Satoshi Kon ever did, has been written about several times on this blog already, but it's still very much a holiday tradition for me to pop this in the DVD player at least once a December. Not many holiday movies-- or non-holiday movies, for that matter-- feature three homeless people in a dysfunctional surrogate family as the three protagonists and as funny as this movie is it also doesn't pull its punches when it comes to showing some of the harsher realities of being homeless and of life in general. As grim as the reality can be, this is a film that is unflinchingly optimistic, at times even over the top in terms of the sheer number of coincidences that occur on this quixotic quest to return an abandoned baby to her mother. It's heartwarming without being cloying or too treacly which can be nice this time of year.

Moving past the nagging certainty that I've left something important off this list, it's time to look ahead to the movies I'm anticipating in the coming year. Not all of them, of course, just the ones that have trailers up. Some of them are already out but I haven't seen them yet, so on the list they go.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Why Can't I Read Jane Austen?

2011-11-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I bought a copy of Pride and Prejudice-- the novel-- with the full intent to get over my inability to read Jane Austen's writing. I'd just finished watching some PBS miniseries adaptation of Emma and had found it so charming and delightful that I had to give her writing another chance.

Now bear in mind here that I'm not writing this as someone who doesn't like reading or classic literature or even old prose. I've been an avid reader my entire life, who voluntarily picked up some Shakespeare when I was twelve and never stopped reading it, who burned through The Iliad and The Odyssey in three days apiece in college (and have been itching to do an adaptation of the latter ever since), and who counts e e cummings as her favorite poet in the whole world, followed closely by good ol' Edgar Allan Poe. Old writing doesn't bore me, heightened prose is like music in my brain, and subtext is one of my most favorite things in the entire world.

So why can't I get past the prologue in this book?

It isn't the story or the characters, since I'm still stuck on page five after two years. No, it's the language. I can't get past the language it's written in and it isn't that it's too old or stuffy or full of subtext and subtlety, it's the simple aesthetics of the words in my head. I have the same problem with most writing from the nineteenth century and I'm not enough of a writer or a linguist to put my finger on what it is. Maybe it's the amount of lingering detail over what I consider to be passing background images-- I love well-described scenery as much as the next person but Nathaniel Hawthorne's pages-long descriptions of the shrubbery Young Goodman Brown is passing on his way through the forest on the way to the whole point of the story make me want to gnaw off my own arm. Maybe that's an unfair characterization of the story, since I only read it once in my early twenties. It's what I remember of it, though, and with The Scarlet Letter, which I couldn't finish despite having checked it out to read of my own volition. There is something in the aesthetics of the language used in English and American literature from this time frame that turns me off completely from stories I would otherwise enjoy very much, which is a source of considerable frustration.

And ten minutes later, blah.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to use this as an excuse for why I'll just content myself with TV and movie adaptations of these stories. Far too often I've found myself on the opposite end of the argument, defending something I love from someone who isn't turned off by the story or the message but by the surface level aesthetics of it. Eiichiro Oda's manga series One Piece was the only bit of Japanese pop culture I payed any attention for nearly a decade, and did so with the kind of joy and adoration that comes along once in a blue moon. I'd go on and on to my friends about everything that I found so amazing about it, the things that moved me and why that series is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of (pre-prequel) Star Wars here or Doctor Who in the UK. Some would give it a try, but most of them couldn't get past the art. Oda's brilliant, unique, quirky art was one of the initial selling points for me because it was so different from anything I'd seen out of Japan. His character designs were and still are some of the most inventive, creative, and out of the ordinary that I've seen; it's part of what attracted me to the series. To many other people, the art is what keeps them from embracing it. This has bothered me considerably over the years, since the story and characters are so wonderful it always seemed a shame to miss out on them simply because of an issue with how "not pretty" the art is. I'd find myself wanting to tell them to just get over it and adjust their aesthetics to something less conventional, but then my thoughts would drift back to that copy of Emma I was unable to finish in high school and I felt too hypocritical to say anything.

This, to me, IS pretty.

Granted, we all have things that don't appeal to us for one reason or another and who's to decide what reasons are more valid than others? "It's not pretty enough" versus "I don't like how she writes" boil down to the same essential argument when you get down to it, and maybe that's why it bothers me so much. I don't understand why it is I don't like it, I just know that I don't. I went through the same thing with movies for years and being unable to articulate why I did or didn't like something bothered me tremendously. Learning about film and how to read it helped me learn to appreciate the entire medium more because I started to understand how deeply it can affect us and how complex it is. I may never enjoy Jane Austen's prose, just like some people might never enjoy the art of Picasso or any movie made before 1989, but that doesn't mean I can't still try to appreciate what other people see in it or what the artists in question were attempting to do. Some of my now favorite things were things I once despised as a kid; pepper, baked salmon, pink and orange together, black and white movies, subtitles, the ornateness of traditional Asian art, tea without sugar, and so on. Over time, with curiosity and sometimes even with effort, I adapted to the idea of them and learned to appreciate them in new and more complex ways. Hopefully one day I'll be able to look back and shake my head in sad wonder that I was unable to appreciate her style for so long. Who knows, by then I might have developed an appreciation for mayonnaise and/or tofu by then, too. You never know.

Halloween Already?

2011-10-29T18:52:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again, when we turn our thoughts to the macabre and spooky, dress up as the things that frighten us, and carve images into large gourds. Horror movies come out of the woodwork, even though they tend to be a constant trend these days. As always, some are bad, some are good, and some are so bad they're good if you're into that sort of thing. Here are some of my favorites that linger at the back of my mind long after the credits have stopped. Not all are supernatural or fantastical in some way; most are about the real life sorts of monsters since those scare me more than the boogeymen tend to. They aren't really fun “party” movies, more the curl up on the couch with a blanket and all the lights off sort. Some are truly horrifying, but it's the poignant melancholy and underlying exploration of human nature that keep me coming back to them. Horror isn't about gore or a momentary startle, per se, that's just momentary viscera. Horror at its core is what the name implies: the things that horrify us. So here's mine.

Joon Ho Bong is one of my favorite directors working today; he also directed The Host and Mother but this is, in my opinion, his best movie to date. Memories of Murder is based around the first actual recorded serial murders in South Korea, events from the mid-80s. The film's atmosphere swings from actually comical in the beginning, when the small-town police force is dealing with something so far beyond their training that they can't even see what's going on. It's often funny but in a sad, uncomfortable way as they fake evidence, torture suspects for confessions, and generally blunder around in such ineptitude you can't help but laugh at the tragedy of it all. They honestly, earnestly think they know what they're doing. It isn't until a cop from Seoul joins the investigation that they make headway, inevitably along with clashing egos and territoriality, but even then it isn't enough. No matter how much they figure out, there are bigger issues at work than their small-town murders. The conflict with North Korea is playing havoc with the resources they need, more and more women are turning up not just dead but mutilated, and the cops begin to realize how deep in over their heads they are. The ugliness of the killer's hatred for his victims is evident in the increasingly upsetting things he does to them. Upsetting in part because we know he doesn't hate them for who they are but simply what they are. We need to believe there are answers just as desperately as the cops do, but there's no way we can be sure of any of it. How many leads were real and how many are we clinging to simply because we so desperately want to believe them?

Le Boucher is probably Claude Chabrol's most well-known film and it lives up to its reputation. Chabrol is often cited as the French Hitchcock and it's clear the two filmmakers influenced each other, as they both play in the same arenas using many similar techniques and comparable levels of skill. They both made movies that are about much more than whatever the plot is and this film is absolutely no exception. It is a murder mystery, a romance, and a fascinating waltz with the dark sides of our own psyches that repel and attract us. The mystery is not what you think it is, and if you go into it expecting a who-done-it, you will be disappointed. That isn't what's going on here at all. We know who did it, we even know why; the mystery is not with the killer at all. Watch it very carefully, especially Stephane Audran as Helene because that knockout performance is the whole reason why this film works. I'd even go so far as to say it is the entire point of the story at all. Watch the scene with the long drive more than once and tell me I'm wrong.

(Chabrol's film The Bridesmaid is currently streaming on Netflix, and is also worth watching. Again, surprise isn't the point of it, but rather knowing what's inevitably coming and simply watching it unfold.)

Of course everyone knows the shocking twist to this film, and most of us have probably seen it at least once. But it's one you can watch over and over because like with Le Boucher, the point isn't the story itself-- it's about something much bigger and quieter and unspoken. Possibly the only true horror film Hitchcock ever directed, the horror doesn't lie in what happens onscreen; it's in the things we never really see happen at all. How many answers do we really have about the whys of Norman Bates? Are monsters born with their monstrosity or are they created from love and innocence and ignorance? How much can we really trust the answers the film tries to give us? How much does the film want us to believe the doctor at the end of the film? How much can we trust anyone's account of the Bates family and what went on in it? Norman's house gives us the only facts we can really trust and even then we're only guessing. But the real question is how much does it matter when we realize the only person there we really love is the villain?

A woman who doesn't know who she is, lost in the city of dreams and new beginnings. She's running from something; she doesn't know what it is, but she knows it's terrible and it's catching up to her. There is nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time, when we were earnest and good, where everyone got what they deserved and mysteries were meant to be solved to put our fears to rest. We forget that sometimes it's worse to know what it is looking back at us from the dark. We knew the whole time it wasn't real-- we bought the ticket, after all-- but sitting there in the dark we forgot about the real world and who we're sitting next to and even who we are. There are moments when we remember it's all an illusion but we want so badly to forget the real world that the winks from the person behind the curtain are jarring and unsettling. We have invented our own fantasy, but we're so busy enjoying the dream that we don't want to wake up. The monsters are scarier in the daylight because we know what they really are.

The distinction between reality and fantasy is drawn much more distinctly in this film than in Lynch's, but there's still plenty of ambiguity left. However, trying to decipher if Ofelia's encounters with the Faun and other creatures is actually happening is a bit beside the point. We'll all have our own opinions on the ending, of course, and that's how del Toro wants it. There is no "right" answer for it. The real meat of the film is in the relationship between innocence and, for lack of a better word, "evil," and how in some ways they are each others' doppelganger. The palate del Toro works with seems stark on the surface but the darks are rich and complex, with the lights serving primarily as a contrast. Sergei Lopez's performance as Vidal is terrifying and utterly riveting.

Thoughts on Catwoman, Noir and Nolan

2011-08-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

I'm going to say up front that I am not an aficionado in the Batman comics and in fact have not read them in many years. My opinions are based largely on The Animated Series, the second volume of the Catwoman comic series and the issues of Batman comics I collected back when I still cared. If I say something that seems out of line with things that have been happening in current comics continuity, that's why. I also don't really care since this is essentially about why I liked the things I paid attention to.

Having finally seen a full photo of Anne Hathaway in the Catwoman costume from Nolan's upcoming Batman movie, my feelings are a bit mixed. Not so much about the costume which I'm pretty happy with, but about this film in general. Expectations are so high for it after the success of The Dark Knight and fandom can get itself worked up into a froth over their own versions of what they want the film to be and reality, even if a well-made film, will often be a disappointment by comparison. With so much grumbling about the casting and the costume already starting I don't want any potential disappointment of failure pinned on her for the sake of scapegoating something. It's possible I won't like what they do with her character, or that she'll wind up like Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2-- set dressing with no necessity to the plot whatsoever. I think Nolan is much smarter and more talented than that, but not having seen it I have no idea what he has planned for her.

Except I suspect at some point she rides a motorcycle.

Up front I feel like I should mention that Catwoman is, far and away, my favorite comic book character ever and she has been since before I hit puberty. I recognize that I am very biased when it comes to her and that there is very little probability that I will ever be completely happy with how she's handled from writer to writer because in my head I've taken bits and pieces from her various incarnations and fused them into my personal idea of her most interesting self. Everyone is going to have different views on her and different degrees of investment in her as a character and I try not to let my own ideas color my expectations too much. Doesn't mean it won't happen, but I'm trying to be self-aware about my issues. I'm not going to waste energy fretting about the costume and will reserve my judgement for how they've handled her character.

As much as I enjoyed the campier portrayal in Burton's Batman Returns, I'm very ready for a more complex and grounded view of her; something more than just a mish-mash of tacked-on, superficially "feminist" ideas which must, by decree of the Hollywood formula, be stripped of validity by the end of the film. It's something the crew on Batman: The Animated Series tried to do back in the '90s, although they were severely hampered by broadcast standards and really didn't seem to know what to do with her at all until the end of the series. Judging from her first solo comic book series starring the mediocre art of Jim Balent and the downright crappy movie starring Halle Berry, most people really didn't know what to do with her beyond making her sexy in the laziest ways possible. The Animated Series couldn't even get away with that much, reduced to head-slappingly bad plotlines about animal rights and sexless flirting, with everyone being so darned earnest about everything. They tried, but they just didn't flesh her out as a full enough character, which is too bad considering the amazing things they did with characters like Mr Freeze, Two-Face and the Mad Hatter. They were much more successful with Poison Ivy, whose sexuality came across more easily and whose eco-terrorism was more compelling than Selina's animal rights crusade which just came off as preachy. The show that gave us the wonderfully complex Harley Quinn could only muster a half-hearted effort for the mythos's most well-known and longest-standing female character.

However badly they fumbled her character, I still give props to that show for doing some pretty fine noir for an animated kid's TV show. It wasn't just the dark palate they used (they painted most of the backgrounds on black paper for what they termed the "dark deco" look), the 1940s flavor to the show's design, the heavy use of gangsters and crime plots, or the other superficial elements that leap to mind with film noir; you can have a noir film without the lighting or the mobsters. What they nailed was the moral ambiguity, the fatalism, and the dance with one's own dark urges and criminality that are at the core of the noir genre. For all its stunning black and white cinematography, true noir is all about shades of grey and that's where the Animated Series and Nolan's movies really work for this concept. They get noir. So does Ed Brubaker.

Pretty good example of noir's atmosphere and philosophy.

In 2001, Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke relaunched the Catwoman comic book title with the intent to bring Selina back to this idea, as well as to try and establish a concrete world and back story for her. Too many writers over the decades never seemed to know who she was at her core or what to do with her. Sure she'd been nicknamed the Feline Fatale but at her core she's never been a killer; as a villain she was never on par with the Joker or Two Face since she's never been homicidally insane, or even a zealot like Poison Ivy or Ras al Ghul. So why her staying power? What is it about her that has made her so enduring and iconic? It can't be simply sex appeal since comics have always been brimming with sexy women characters. Why her continued place as a femme fatale when she's never been very ruthless and never been known for killing anyone? Because the very idea of the femme fatale is rooted in male anxiety-- she's dangerous not necessarily because of her intentions or her actions but because of the effect she has on the male protagonist. She is the temptation that leads him to his downfall, either spiritually or physically, whether she did it on purpose or not. She's too alluring and beguiling for him to refuse even though he knows he should, and that's exactly what Selina is to Bruce.

Out of the Past from Kathy's perspective is more like a Lifetime movie of the week.

She isn't insane, she isn't out to hurt anybody, and in many ways they're very similar. They're just compatible enough to be compelling but just different enough in their ideologies and methods to not be able to cross that thin line that divides them. The danger isn't so much that Bruce will go dark and become more ruthless, it's that he'll forget his past and everything that set him on his personal mission, settle down and try his best to be normal. As healthy as it would probably be for him to let go of his inner demons, it's the thing he's built his whole life around (and the whole reason anyone gives a crap about all those comic books, TV shows and movies he's in). There's nothing standing between them except their own issues, so the tension is always there under the surface as they each walk with one foot on that line without ever fully crossing over.

For my money, nobody got that better than Brubaker in his short stint on her book. Not only did he do his best to take what he felt worked for Selina from the different back stories that had been tossed out there after Frank Miller's Year One comic, but he also did his best to ground her character in something more concrete than just a vague idea of sexiness, heist capers and being attracted to Batman. He brought her back to Gotham, gave her a purpose more compelling than just elaborate adventures in exotic locations, and rooted her in something solid and believable. A lot of people take umbrage at the idea of her having been a prostitute in her younger days; admittedly it wasn't my favorite choice and it's one of my many issues with Frank Miller's take on her character (or most of his female characters). But Brubaker took it and gave it a purpose in her overall story instead of letting it exist simply for the sake of being dark or titillating. This gave her much higher personal stakes than if she'd been a bored socialite or the daughter of a crime boss or even a runaway orphan. It explains why she can't see the world in black and white the way Bruce does, why she can't bring herself to cross that line between them and why we should care about what she's managed to build from her life. Bruce is a character that has defined himself by one incident and built his life around it using all the advantages he had at his disposal. Selina doesn't have one single character-defining moment in her history and what she has was built by herself from nothing. She understands criminality and the things people will do to survive in ways Bruce never has because he has never been completely alone or without privilege, respect and pride. For her to cross that dividing line into Bruce's more lawful idea of heroism would take a kind of hypocritical self-denial that Selina's too savvy to trick herself into believing. She can never see the lowest people on society's totem pole as just criminals because she was one of them. She can never work strictly by the law or believe in the criminal justice system because she knows they often fail. For all their similarities and mutual respect and attraction, Bruce and Selina see the world in very different ways. Because of that, they also humanize each other.

Brubaker wrote their relationship as a tantalizing dance between two people who knew each other's secrets, who understood each other in ways no one else did, but who didn't have to come out and say any of it because they liked the dance too much to ruin it with the obvious. It was sexier than any double entendre or moonlit make out scene because he understood that the things that aren't said are far more tantalizing than the things that are. When done right, an exchanged glance or a charged silence can be far sexier than any graphic love scene. He also went out of his way to toss out Bruce's emotionless Machiavellian wish-fulfillment badass persona in favor of writing him as a human damn being, which practically no one else was doing at the time. (See above link for examples.)

That isn't to say Brubaker's run was perfect, there were plenty of things in it I thought could have been improved or were unnecessary. But what he did right, he did damned well, especially in paying attention to the characters, making them unique, flawed, likable people you wanted to read about every month. It didn't feel like a superhero book so much as a mystery/crime story with a few eccentricities. For the first time since the 90s, Selina seemed like a real person, not some idealized, self-obsessed sex goddess who floated through life on her tiptoes. She was someone who was learning from her past mistakes, growing as a character, weighed down by her history and a new sense of maturity and responsibility. She was someone with close emotional ties to people, who remembered where she came from but who had a sense of purpose for the future. They finally let her grow as a person in a way that was believable and made sense with her past. She was someone I could understand at last, and ultimately that's really all I ask for.

Do I think Nolan will use this rather dark personal history for her? Not really, and I'm all right with that. Not sure how the public would take to seeing a less romanticized version of Pretty Woman in their superhero crime thriller, and it seems more likely they'll go with the subplot from The Long Halloween and have her being tied to the Falcone crime family. So long as she's not just some personification of an idea with no further depth beyond her physicality, bad cat jokes and reminding the audience that our hero is an angst-ridden, tragic heterosexual man, I'll be fine with whatever back story they give her. I just want to know there's a real character in there. If they can do that much, then I'll be satisfied.

IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Karma"

2011-07-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to another installment of I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means, where I bust out my love of semantics all over a word that I feel has been misappropriated, misunderstood, or maybe not understood at all because no one's ever heard of it. Today's word is well-known to most people, even outside Hindu and Buddhist circles, and while most people get the general gist of it, there's a certain nuance to the concept that tends to get shoved aside.

Karma is a Sanskrit word that means "action." As in, to act upon something in a physical manner. That's the literal translation, feel free to pass that around at parties as a cool piece of trivia. However, in relation to religious/philosophical meaning, we understand it to mean "what goes around comes around" or "you get what's coming to you." It's the right idea, sure, and I think most cultures around the world have a similar concept, but "karma" sounds cool and gets the point across in one word.

The thing most of us forget or never learn in the first place about it is that at its core it's not a super judgmental term. A lot of us, because we're human and by nature we like feeling better than other people, use it as a way to basically call other people stupid, mean, or just inferior in some way, even though all of us have probably done stupid, mean things ourselves... like, say, scoffing at other people's unhappiness and misfortune. Karma, in its basic sense, is not about cosmic judgement for doing something wrong, like we tend to think of it. It's more like the principle in physics that states "every action has an equal and opposite reaction." Karma isn't a punishment from a sentient being to put us in our place when we get out of line, it's a universal force that acts essentially like a swing: when it gets pushed in one direction, it naturally swings back the other direction. A match catches on fire when it's struck with enough friction to light it-- the burning is the karma of the act of striking it, it's the natural end result of the action.

Like this, only the ball is that thing you said to your boss's wife at the Christmas party.

Now that isn't to say that there aren't moral judgments involved in the religious/philosophical teachings of the word; the ideas of "good karma" and "bad karma" are central to Hindu and Buddhist teachings. In Hinduism, it's one's actions that determine what becomes of them in their next life-- reincarnation runs on karma, so that the more good karma one collects during their life the higher they ascend in the cosmic hierarchy; this is also where the caste system comes into play. One is born into their position because of the actions they took in their past life. Their only way out is to perform the duties of one's position to the best of their abilities and lead a moral life so that they'll be reborn into a higher position in the next life, and so on. I hesitate to use the caste system as an example since a) it's very complex and I'm hardly an expert in it, and b) it's changed significantly over the course of Indian history, particularly in the wake of British colonialism, and again in the modern age where its significance is decreasing. But I did want to illustrate that the idea of what we call "instant karma," where the effect of one's action takes

place immediately afterward isn't really what the concept was originally about. It was more about long-term repercussions that may not take effect immediately during this lifetime, but that collect over time and affect one's next life drastically.

Makes you wish we thought about the long-term view a little more often.

What I find most ironic about the majority of the people I hear using the word karma in everyday conversation is that the very way they employ it would constitute bad karma. It's usually someone insinuating that another person's misfortune is deserved because that person did something stupid at some point, but looking down on other people for making mistakes is hardly the embodiment of self-awareness. Of course I'm just as guilty of it as anyone is, and writing these sorts of posts helps to remind me to remember that. As my old band teacher used to tell us, "when you point at someone else, you have three fingers pointing back at yourself." (Back then I spent an embarrassing amount of time missing the point by trying to devise a way to point ahead while keeping all other fingers aimed away from myself.) Of course she was talking about someone's instrument being out of tune and telling us that we should all check ourselves before assuming it's someone else, but I believe the point stands in a larger context. Or, as one of my favorite movies put it, "you'll never be a first-class human being until you learn to have a little regard for human frailty."

Also, everyone needs to go watch The Philadelphia Story right now.

Social Justice Movements and Fantasy Media

2011-06-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

There has been a thought bouncing around in my head for a while now and I've never been entirely sure how to approach it. With the opening of X-Men: First Class and the upcoming premiere of the fourth season of True Blood, maybe now is the time to explore it briefly. There won't be any spoilers for First Class since I haven't seen it yet, but I will cover the X-Men as an idea in general, and there might be some spoilers for True Blood, since I have seen that.

Spoiler line just to be safe, la la la.

All right, so Southern-fried vampire soap opera and classic comic book showcasing people with superhuman powers fighting for the good of the very people who hate and fear them. What do they have in common? Well, the X-Men book started back in the 60s when the Civil Rights movement was starting to gear up. Whether or not that was the original intention is a little beside the point since by the time Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum took over in the 70s, that was most definitely the running theme of the book. The vampires in True Blood, as in the book series the show is based on, are also used as allegories for oppressed minorities: in the beginning they have recently "come out of the coffin" and face fear and prejudice from the general population, law enforcement, politicians, and the religious right. Both series mix different obstacles faced by various groups over the course of history, like the Mutant Registration Act from X-Men being analogous to the laws in Nazi Germany requiring the "undesirables" of society to be made identifiable, and the Fellowship of the Sun in True Blood being rather like a combination of the Westboro Baptist Church and the Ku Klux Klan. So to compare the two series on that front seems pretty fair to me.

From True Blood's opening sequence.

Now, as much as I enjoy both of these series and agree with the spirit of the message, here's the part where I run into a little bit of trouble with the actual practice of using fantasy/science fiction analogies for the real-world oppression of human minority groups: the basis of Civil Rights and of basic human rights is that no matter what the racial, ethnic, class, sexual preference, gender or religious background may be, these differences are superficial and pale in comparison to the similarities inherent to simply being human. There is nothing a person from one group can do to anyone that a person from another group, including the majority group, could not also do. Underneath, we're all fundamentally the same.

This is not the case with mutants and vampires. As soon as you introduce the possibility of a teenager being able to blow one of their classmates' face off with lasers from their eyes, we have gone from "propaganda threat" to "that registration act doesn't seem so unreasonable." A black person being pulled over for driving a car with a white woman in it cannot, in fact, magically hypnotize the police officer into handing over his gun during a very tense confrontation.

The perceived threat from real life minorities becomes a very real and potential threat as soon as the supernatural gets involved, which changes the dynamics of the entire situation. This isn't to say that I think these ideas are stupid, but I do think this fundamental flaw in the message needs to be addressed, which also means that the people writing them need to be aware of it. Otherwise you wind up comparing a gay man who has no greater physical or supernatural abilities than a straight man would have to a man who can physically pull the iron from your blood through your skin in order to escape from prison. As well-intentioned as I think X-Men is, I don't think it gets this.

I do, however, think True Blood understands and has very subtly commented on this over the past several seasons. The imagery of a young gay, black man being chained by the neck in the basement of a blond-haired, blue-eyed vampire who at one point literally rips someone in half with his bare hands speaks to this point, as does the image of a young black woman dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown trying to escape from a plantation mansion where she has been sexually assaulted by an Anglo vampire. There are things the show does that make us uncomfortable this way, and there are simply too many of them for me to believe this is a coincidence. As much as I admire this about the show-- along with its recognizing its own inherent cheesiness, its refusal to take itself too seriously, while also managing to dance along the line between funny and horrifying-- this does raise another issue: because of the very strong overt message of vampires as an allegory for oppressed minorities, what will happen as this story progresses and the subtle commentary about the unfairness of this comparison becomes more noticeable? Will it undermine the legitimate arguments from real life activists who demand equal rights by unintentionally validating the fears of the majority? I certainly hope not, and if I'm right and this commentary is deliberate on the writers' part, I have faith in them to handle this with the intelligence and delicate footwork it will require. In the meantime, it seems like a good idea to bring this subject up and mull it over as we watch our entertaining fantasy versions of the state of civil rights and public attitudes toward The Other.

Help a Friend

2011-06-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

Hey all, dropping a note for the sake of friend and co-femme Stacy, who's hitting a big financial brick wall rather suddenly and could really use a hand. She's taking commissions, the details of which are over at Creepy Kitch. If you can't help out, maybe you know someone who can. Thanks muchly.

Rambling Post On Film Criticism

2011-06-07T02:58:00.000-07:00

Hello out there in internetland, sorry it's been so long. I'm currently in finals week of my last quarter of college (for now), and it's been one nutty ride this year. I have not, as you may have noticed, gotten to the many blog posts I have promised so far, but seeing as how I'll have a lot of free time on my hands soon, I'll probably get to them... eventually.

For the time being, however, I have added massive quantities of links to the right side of this page, which should help fill your time until I can muster the brainpower to write a coherent article.

I also want to comment on something that seems to be a topic of interest amongst certain circles at the moment, and that is the nature and public perception of film criticism. Some very smart people have written some very interesting things in the past several days and I thought I'd pass some of them along. Feel more than free to offer opinions and comments, I love hearing from people, even if they disagree with me as long as it's civil and in the spirit of debate-- something that gets touched on in some of these.

Clarence Page at the Chicago Tribune I think my have started this current debate

Hulk gives his thoughts in a very articulate and intelligent piece

Mark Harrison at Den Of Geek also offers some food for thought

*New* Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott at the New York Times offer a perspective on what they call "slow film" and the subjectiveness of "boring" (Thanks to Hulk for the recommendation.)

There are more out there but these are the three I came across that I found the most thought-provoking. Honestly, I have my own ideas on the topic, and this is something that surfaces now and again as I navigate both the practice of studying film and the social ramifications of being a "movie snob" to people who don't. Let me give you an overview of why I really hate that term, and it isn't just because I hear it in application to myself or to people I happen to agree with, or even to people I may not agree with but whose viewpoint I find interesting. It's because it's a cheap way to invalidate someone else's opinion without having to engage with their actual argument.

Let me tell you a secret that a lot of people don't seem to understand about film: there are very few "right" answers. There seems to be this idea that there's some kernel of absolute "Truth" at the center of anything and that if you whittle it down far enough you'll eventually discover the definitive answer. The problem with this is film is art, and like all art, its meaning and value are totally subjective to the one viewing it. Likewise, are the opinions of those reviewing/critiquing it. For me personally, a good film reviewer is not the person with whom I agree the most often, it's the one who actually thinks about the film and then writes about it in such a way that makes me think about it. There have been numerous films I have watched for a class or on my own that I initially disliked or was confused by, but after reading a thoughtful review or an academic article or even just discussing it with someone else, I learned to appreciate certain aspects of it that I never would have otherwise. They may be things I ultimately disagree with, or they may not be enough to get me to enjoy the film, but I absolutely appreciate having insight into it. That's basically what studying criticism allows you to do: not to arrive at the "right" answer as to whether a movie is objectively good or bad, but to aid in the ability to understand why someone enjoys a film or doesn't.

Another secret: my taste in movies has stayed exactly the same since I started learning about film. There have been a few here and there that I now see in a new light, but by and large, I enjoy the same things I did before and dislike the same things. The only significant change in my discussion of the topic is my ability to articulate why I feel the way I do about a given film. That's it. Well, that and the confidence to actually express my opinion instead of trying to convince myself I like a film when I don't just because I can't figure out why, or I feel obligated to because everyone else likes it. I used to waste a lot of energy trying to justify things in films that I didn't like because I felt I should, for some bizarre reason, and let me tell you, it is such a relief to quit doing that. No, if anything has changed in regards to my movie collection, it's simply the scope. Learning the mechanics of how movies work hasn't "taken the magic out of it," as I hear some people argue, it's actually increased my appreciation for it. The movies I loved before, I enjoy watching even more now than I did when I first saw them because I understand them on a deeper level. I love watching movies. I really love watching good movies, but in all honesty there are so few films out there that I consider worthless; there's usually something I find worthwhile in almost any of them, even if I dislike the end result overall.

But at the end of the day, it's all just opinion. That's all a critic has to offer: the same thing everyone else has, only with better articulated reasons and hopefully some interesting insights. Studying film doesn't teach anyone how to figure out the "right" answer, it helps inform the understanding of why a given person feels the way they do about it. That's it. It doesn't mean you have to agree with it, but hopefully it might make you think a little deeper about why you feel the way you do. Who knows, it might even make you appreciate it more than you might have otherwise, or even interest you in a film you might not have given a chance before. I think one of the greatest things I'm taking away from my film education is the really great movies I've been exposed to that I would never have heard of otherwise. Ultimately, what this blog is doing isn't just providing a platform for my opinions and ideas, but it's a space for me to share these movies with other people.

Oscars for the Movies of '10

2011-02-23T23:27:00.000-08:00

So the Oscars are this Sunday and I just realized I haven't said a single thing about them. Honestly, I'm not terribly hyped up about them this year. The only category I'm that invested in is Best Supporting Actress and that's simply because it's one of the very few that's actually something of a toss-up. Everything else seems pretty cut and dried which isn't very suspenseful and for someone like me who either knows the movie she's rooting for won't win or hasn't seen the vast majority of the movies in question yet, it's pretty anti-climactic. I'll still watch them because I'm a nerd that way and it's one of the very few social things I get to do all year and I look forward to making snide comments MST3K style as I secretly hope for a major upset just for the sake of some drama.

So instead of making a list of predictions about what will/might/should win as everyone else on the internet has already done, I'll just mention briefly what I would like to see win and why it won't. Brace for extreme nerdery.

Best Picture

I'm not very worked up about this category since I've only seen three out of the ten nominees and found two of them to be pretty over-rated. Maybe I've been in a grumpy mood for the past three months but for the life of me I cannot understand the huge fuss over Inception and Toy Story 3. Yeah, you heard me, internet, I didn't think they were that great. They weren't awful but I failed to understand why so many people-- smart people, many of whom I know and am very fond of-- kept going on about how amazing they were. I'd want to watch them again because I feel like I missed something crucial, but frankly I don't really want to. The other one I saw was True Grit and while I did like it a great deal, I was left with that same feeling of empty calories after it was over. I wasn't as vaguely irritated while watching it because it entertained me more than the other two, but I was still left with a feeling of "yeah, and?" when it was over. Maybe it's me, I don't know. But it's pretty much a forgone conclusion that The King's Speech is going to take Best Picture, which makes this category even less interesting since there's really no debate. Does it deserve to win? Probably? I don't have an opinion because I haven't seen it or the other six nominees, so I have no idea what I consider to be the "best" amongst them. What would I like to see win? Winter's Bone would be fun just because it's so different from the rest of them, a true indy film that was a surprise nominee and which I've heard from darn near everyone is a really great film. No way it'll happen, but I'm really glad it's been nominated since it might entice people to actually see it.

Best Actor

If Colin Firth somehow doesn't win this it may be a sign of the apocalypse. I don't think there's any way that statue's going to anyone else, which frankly is okay with me. I like Firth a lot and I was absolutely blown away by his performance in A Single Man last year (if you haven't seen that movie, go watch it now). I knew he wouldn't win his nomination for that but I was still rooting for him anyway, so I'm glad he gets to take it this year. Having said that, I'm also a fan of Jeff Bridges (have been since the Fabulous Baker Boys so I'm glad he's getting recognized for the huge talent he is), Javier Bardem, and James Franco, so this is really a nice lineup for me. I wouldn't be disappointed with anyone winning, but this is definitely Firth's year.

Best Actress

Natalie Portman's all but got this one in the bag since she's swept darn near every awards ceremony for this role. I haven't seen Black Swan yet so I have no opinion on her performance in it, but I've always liked her so it's nice she's getting recognition for being more than just a pretty face. I suppose I should get snide about how anti-climactic the category is, and it is, but... that is just a damn fine lineup of really amazing actresses in interesting roles. I can't get grumpy about this category this year except that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Let's keep this caliber of work going, what do you say? (Also, I do sort of hope Anette Benning wins just because she's never won despite being a really great actress and Hillary Swank isn't up for anything this year. Curse you, Portman and your point shoes.)

Supporting Actor

Christian Bale's pretty much a lock for this one from what I've gleaned and I don't have anything against the guy, so eh, whatever. Once again I find myself in a limbo of indifference since I haven't seen any of the films these guys are in. I will say, however, that I absolutely adore Geoffrey Rush and wish he were in more things, so I wouldn't be a bit sad if he took the statue.

Supporting Actress

Once again, what a really fantastic lineup. Everyone says this is pretty much a toss up between Melissa Leo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Helena Bonham Carter which makes it officially the most exciting category of the evening. Since Steinfeld's is the only performance I've seen yet, and it was far and away my favorite thing about that movie, she's at the top of my list (and yes, like everyone else I agree that she is a lead actress, not a supporting one-- hell she's the main character of the movie which she also narrates). But Carter's been a perennial favorite of mine for a few years now too, so I'd be happy if she won. Frankly, I'm just happy that this category is brimming with such fantastic performances that it's hard to know who to root for. I can't say I'll be disappointed no matter who wins.

Best Director

David Fincher is pretty universally tagged to win this one, especially since The Social Network was the frontrunner for the Best Picture category until The King's Speech came along, so this way they can still honor both films with pretty big awards. This is another category I don't feel very strongly about since it's pretty much a foregone conclusion and I've only seen the Coen Bother's film. Is there anyone who doesn't know they're good directors yet? So yeah, don't really care who wins it.

Animated Film

Toy Story 3, despite being over-rated and incredibly over-sentimentalized in my opinion, is going to win this by a mile. It's up for Best Picture and Best Screenplay for crying out loud. Would I love to see How to Train Your Dragon or The Illusionist cause an upset and take the prize? You bet I would. I'd probably do a cartwheel in the street if that happened and I'm privately cursing the incredibly poor timing that pitted these two films (especially Dragon) up against this juggernaut instead of the upcoming Cars 2 where they might actually stand a chance of winning a very richly deserved award. Could it happen? Ehhhh maybe. Dragon did sweep the Annie Awards (the animation industry's awards ceremony for those who don't know), and has been a classic underdog since it was released, and everyone loves an underdog. Plus, I don't know if I'm the only one who finds it rather tacky that Disney/Pixar made a big show about really pushing for the brass ring of Best Picture to make a statement about the viability of animation as a medium, but when it came down to it they weren't willing to pull out of the Best Animated Feature category. Despite their bluster about respecting the work, they just couldn't bear to put everything on the line for it and give up the sure thing in the animated category, leaving the other two very fine features without Best Picture nominations twisting in the wind. It's a dick move and cheapened an effort to gain respectability that I've been hoping for for a long time. I'm probably the only one that found it tacky for them to do that, but I did, and I'm realizing that I'm starting to edge closer into the Pixar Grinch arena than I thought I ever would. In my vindictive little heart, I'd dance with glee if Dragon took this and left Pixar with nothing for the year. It won't happen, but I can dream for now. In less petty arenas, I'm glad The Illusionist took the third spot in this category since it's a lesser-known film and people might actually watch it now and I'll get a DVD release, plus I always love to see traditional animation represented. It's also very different from the other two films, and from most films that make it into this category, and that too is always welcome. It's good to remind people that animation isn't a genre.

Original Score

Wow, next to Supporting Actress this is the biggest toss up for me. I'm going to guess the King's Speech will probably take this, but what a fantastic variety here. Everything from traditional orchestra to Trent Reznor is in here and they all sound very unique, distinct, and some are downright experimental. That's really cool. Of course I'm rooting for John Powell and How to Train Your Dragon (in and of itself that's a score with a huge variety in it), since that's been on my playlist since the film was released and I'd like the poor thing to win something. But it's the underdog again, and pretty much anything else in the category is more likely to win than it is. Ah well, it's nice just to be nominated.

Anything else I'm not terribly concerned with, at least not enough to write about. So there you go, my much anticipated Oscar predictions. You may all resume your lives now.

Review: "Tangled"

2010-11-28T20:01:00.001-08:00

For those of the spoiler-phobic disposition, beware, I may sprinkle some rather liberally through this review. If you wish to avoid them, I'll give you the short version: I did not love this movie. I didn't hate it, either. I'd call my reaction "tepid" and occasionally frustrated at what I felt like it not only could have been but should have been. I will also say that I appear to be in a vast minority, judging from Rotten Tomatoes and my own online f-list. If you saw the trailer and thought it looked like a laugh riot, then go, you'll enjoy it. If, like me, you looked at the preview and thought they were trying way too hard and not hitting the mark, wait for DVD.

Spoilers beyond this point, beware all ye who read past this line.

Since I got home last night I've been trying to focus on exactly why

this movie fell so far short of my already hesitant expectations, and I'm still not entirely sure. In part, I felt like the character animation wasn't quite up to snuff-- the three leads look too perfect, with no blemishes, little imperfections, or quirky facial features to offer anything very interesting to look at. They came off looking more like dolls than people, and without much in the way of visual performance beyond highly repetitive slapstick numbers and not a lot in the way of internal mechanics, I found myself very aware that I was watching some very pretty emptiness. I might change my mind if I ever watch this again, but going off my first impression, the characters didn't seem to do much in the way of "thinking" or experience an emotion that wasn't telegraphed a mile wide.

This leads to my second issue: the lack of character depth in general. Again, I'm not expecting Hamlet from Disney, but characters that feel like they had at least some thought beyond archetype tropes put into them would be nice. Rapunzel fared the best in this department, I think, and there were some interesting things done with her, but quite often she ran into trouble in terms of interesting animation that might have added that little extra depth that could have pushed her over the edge in Really Interesting territory. Sadly, she spent most of her time hovering in the Has Potential lobby. To a lesser extent, Flynn suffered from the same issue, and the Mother character was just flat as a pancake. I tried to get invested in them, but the only one I felt an even remote connection to was Rapunzel and quite often that connection would get squashed by a completely unnecessary musical sequence or series of slapstick jokes. This happened with nearly any moment where started to feel like we were finally getting into some character development/connection, which was irritating and downright annoying by the end of the movie. I get the concept of delayed gratification, but the filmmakers weren't giving me enough time to get a solid foothold into my caring about ANYTHING that was happening. It's like in their effort to ramp up the swashbuckling adventure/humor elements they cut too deeply into any real emotional resonance for the audience (or just me, whatever).

Major irritants: the musical numbers and the animal sidekicks. I'll give the horse a pass since they did a serviceable job of making him important to the plot in some small ways, but the lizard was completely pointless and just took up running time that could have gone into character development or humor that didn't involve hitting someone with a frying pan. The same goes for the songs. I'm not anti-musical, in fact I quite enjoy them when they're well-made. But I have a rule for the musical numbers: if they don't advance the plot, reveal character, or transport the audience from one level of emotion to another in the service of the previous two things, in ways that can't be done as efficiently with plain dialog, cut the song because it's dead weight and will drag the pace of the movie down. For me, that was every SINGLE song in this movie. I have never been so annoyed with musical numbers as I have been with this movie. I could be a bit more forgiving if the songs were at least catchy/fun enough to be memorable, but none of them were. They were dull, dead weight around the neck of this film, and again, that time could have been better used in the aid of character development or plot advancement.

I've mentioned the humor several times, and it probably works for a lot of people. It didn't work for me at all. Can't say why, really, maybe it was too dependent on repetitive slapstick and abruptly halting animation and not anything actually clever or creative. This was probably the biggest mood dampener for me, since it felt like so much of the run-time was devoted to it and it just flat-out did not work for me. I gave a few half-hearted chuckles at first, but I got tired of it pretty fast and gave up. Other people seem to like it, and if there's anything that's subjective, it's humor, so eh, whatever. I do object to the filmmakers trying to use it for character development instead of actual character development in the case of Flynn.

All in all, though, I think my biggest complaint was this nagging sense that this movie really could have been something a lot better and different than it was. It felt like I was watching something that could have been great but was hamstrung by a bunch of people who were too afraid to take risks. Elements of this would surface now and then and I'd find my interest piqued only to have it re-submerge and never appear again for the sake of banality. That was the worst of it. Don't dangle the carrot in front of my face long enough to get me excited and then take it away. You can't be brave and cowardly at the same time, either take the court or go back to the bench.

I don't know if it was a lack of faith in the animators, the story, or the audience, but I suspect the latter. Rule one in movie-making: trust your audience. If you can't do that, do something else with your life. Trust that we will understand what a character is feeling without having to spell it out in huge letters. Those musical numbers felt superfluous specifically because they were not necessary to understand anything. It was like getting "Anakin, you're breaking my heart" on repeat for two minutes a pop every ten minutes or so. Film, and especially animation, is a visual medium: SHOW us, don't TELL us. If you don't trust the audience to understand the significance of a moment that has been built up for half the film in every conceivable way without a song TELLING us how the character feels, you have issues. The moment with the lanterns would have been so much more powerful resting on the ability of the animators to convey it on Rapunzel's face instead of the song they felt was necessary. I get it's a big moment, I don't need you slapping my face asking me if I get it yet. Give us the opportunity to figure it out for ourselves, it means so much more when we do. Other animation studios get this, it's time to step up and get with the program.

Having said all that, I didn't hate it. It's not going on my "must own" list, or even my "I'll rent it when it comes out" list, but I'm probably in a minority there. Everyone seems to quite like, if not even love this movie, and that's fine. I really wanted to, heck, I paid $9 to see it on an evening when I could have stayed off the icy streets and watched a movie I know I already like. I heard friends wax poetic about how much they liked it, I skimmed reviews to the same effect, and I figured if nothing else I'd get an hour and a half of nice animation. Instead I spent an hour and a half being very aware that I was watching a movie in a theater. I was constantly aware that I had seen nearly all of this before in other Disney movies and I had a hard time trying not to directly compare them. It was like a mash-up of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame when it would have been nice to just see Rapunzel without the ghosts of Disney past. Yeah, you had some successful movies back then, but don't strip their carcasses to try and pad your new movies. Figure out WHY those moments worked and go with that, don't just recycle the same ideas over and over again. In short, I was bored. I am frequently many things while watching animation, but"bored" is not one of them, even if the movie itself isn't that great. I left feeling frustrated, confused and irritated at the waste of it all. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what it could or should have been if someone had taken the chances the film needed to really breathe and come into its own the way it had the potential to do.

For a less clichéd version of (a surprisingly similar take on) the Rapunzel story, check out the graphic novel Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon, Dean and Nathan Hale. I read it a few years ago and found it really charming and clever in ways that fell flat for me here. Even if you liked this movie, check it out, you'll probably like it.

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T17:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick holiday greeting to the general blogosphere. I'd been hoping to write out some ideas that have been bouncing around in my head about the popularity of vampires and werewolves right now, especially with adolescent and teen girls, but sadly I'm up to my pits in papers and reading for school right now and didn't get it done. So maybe you'll see it around Thanksgiving. Mmm, festive.

So instead, here's a short list of some of my favorite scary movies, in case anyone out there just can't decide what to watch to get in the Halloween spirit.

Anyone else want to share their favorite scary movies? Go right ahead! Happy Halloween!

Brenda Chapman Off "Brave"

2010-10-19T01:15:00.001-07:00

Okay, it's late and I have things I need to be doing aside from this, but I won't be able to sleep tonight until I get this off my chest. It seems the upcoming Pixar film Brave (formerly known as The Bear and the Bow) will no longer be directed by Brenda Chapman as she has left the studio. For anyone who missed my commentary on the discussion around the lack of leading females in Pixar films, Brave was kind of a big deal, not just because it marked the studio's first female lead but also because it would mark its first female director as well. And just like in live-action, female directors in animated features is a rare thing. In fact, Chapman is America's first female animated feature director with The Prince of Egypt. She hasn't directed another movie since then, and I'm having a hard time coming up with another female animated feature director outside Nina Paley (who was totally independent and not part of a big studio). So now, it's being directed by Mark Andrews who co-directed the Pixar short One Man Band, but beyond that I don't have much info on him.

No one's saying why Chapman was replaced yet, and honestly, it could be for legitimate reasons. Directors and people in all sorts of positions get replaced in films all the time, so what makes this such a big deal? Precisely because there are so few women directors out there, especially in feature-length animation. Especially because it's at a studio with the prestige and clout that Pixar has. The reason this studio gets singled out for this sort of scrutiny is because they make good films, period, and people pay attention to them. Why does anyone care if Pixar has a female lead or a female director? Because it matters what they do. Because they set a standard in the industry that matters not just in animation but in live-action film as well. Up was the only animated film aside from Beauty and the Beast to break into the Best Feature category at the Oscars, and before that there was questioning amongst critics as to why Ratatouille hadn't made that leap as well. John Lasseter has stated that Pixar is a director-driven studio and that telling a good story and artistic vision come before anything else there, so it's especially troubling that its first female director left before her project was even finished. Said project is now to be finished by someone else, who is male. This isn't surprising, seeing as how female directors are so hard to come by, but it begs the question yet again: when are women going to be able to tell our own stories? When will this not be a big deal? When will we stop having to put "female" in front of "director" to clarify that it is a woman directing a movie?

I'm far from the only one asking these questions, too. The Animation Guild Blog posted about this in June with Where the Girls Aren't; Film.com recently asked In What Year Will Female Directors Make Up Half the Workforce?; and Women and Hollywood reported on the Zero Progress Made on Gender Disparity in Films Targeted at Kids. I'm sure there are others out there as well, but the point is, as much as gender shouldn't matter in terms of replacing a director on a project, frankly, it does. Not only does the director guide the cohesiveness and vision of the entire film, but in a project like this, where much of the creation of the project was helmed by the director, the loss of a rare female vision for a female-centered story is sad, disappointing, and for someone like me who hopes to break into both directing and animation, it's discouraging and frustrating. Mark Andrews may be more suited to helm this project than Chapman was, and he may do a fine job and help produce a good film with a good female lead. But it won't cease to be troubling that Chapman is one of the few women successfully blazing this trail in American animation, and that her leaving a project is causing such a stir specifically because she's a woman. Yeah, gender shouldn't matter, but it does. When half the population of the human race is considered "other" and "token" and under-represented in such a huge way, the loss of one in a position like that matters.

Animation Break!

2010-10-03T00:10:00.000-07:00

Well the school year is upon me again and naturally I didn't get around to making all the updates I wanted to for the blog. I'm working on my feminism in animation series still, but in the meantime I thought I'd just post up some really cool things I've collected from Youtube over the past while.

What did I do before Youtube? I honestly don't remember anymore.

Nina Paley's very creative Flash animation demonstrates her standing on the so-called "Cult of Originality" that seems to be quite pervasive at the moment. I quite agree with her point: everything builds on what came before it, and art is certainly no exception.

Another Paley Flash bit, this time it's the opening credits of her film Sita Sings the Blues. It's not only very well-designed and animated, but it conveys the Hindu version of the creation of the universe without any narration or dialog in approximately three and a half minutes. That's some visual storytelling.

Some wonderful traditional animation from Tony White. While I'm ambivalent about actually animating Hokusai's work, since one of the things I always found striking about it was the implication of movement-- to make it actually appear to move seems to take something away from it. But nonetheless, this is wonderful work. Also, it's very informative about the work of a brilliant artist.

Russia has such a rich history with animation I'm a bit beside myself that I can't get my hands on more of it. If anyone used to watch the Animated Shakespeare show on HBO back in the '90s, I believe most of, if not all of the animation for it was done by Russian studios and there was a fantastic variety of media and some incredible creativity at work in those. This short was linked to me by a friend in Hungary and I can't tell you how much I love it. It's a perfect example of comedic timing at its best.

I may be a little bit biased, since I grew up on He-Man, She-Ra, Transformers, and My Little Ponies, but even disregarding the nostalgia factor, this is some very creative stop-motion animation done by (I believe) amateurs. This is the first video I favorited on Youtube years ago and I still get a kick out of it.

A professor of mine last year showed this in class and it absolutely blew me away. It is bar none one of the most moving, creative, and perfectly executed pieces of animation and performance art I've ever seen. If you haven't seen it, watch it. If you have, watch it again. It's simply spectacular.

Review: The Expendables

2010-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

I love going to the movies, whether with friends or by myself. I especially enjoy watching action movies. Sylvester Stallone, along with his cavalcade of co-stars, delivers a movie that has kickass fight scenes, plenty of explosions to go around (and then some), and an array of 80’s action movie icons. The Expendables has a straightforward and somewhat simplistic plot, yet over all fun to watch.

Okay, enough of the polite, semi-professional demeanor. Reviewing movies is a new hobby for me, and I want to make a good impression. That being said, I also want to make sure that what you all read sounds like me; not my knee-jerk reaction to write for my high school English teacher. Now let’s get to the review.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, The Expendables is a fun movie to watch…though it does lack imagination and originality. Really there’s nothing new about a group of mercenaries going off to some small country (in this case an island near South America) to over throw a dictator. Nor is there anything new about mass explosions and kickass fight scenes, no matter how cool they look. As for the array of 80’s action movie icons, well that’s just entertaining. Any pop-culture reference to my childhood always makes me smile.

What little creativity there was in The Expendables comes from the fight scenes. My favorite fight scene happens on a basketball court, and Jason Statham (Lee Christmas) is the one doing the damage. I also really enjoyed the fight scenes with Stone Cold Steve Austin, especially when he fights Randy Couture. And of course watching He-Man: Master of the Universe (aka Dolph Lundgren) as a washed out, drug addicted, soldier holds a special place in my heart; a place where childhood memories come to a screeching halt into reality when you realize a childhood hero isn't as cool as he used to be.

As entertaining as the fight scenes were, perhaps my favorite scene in the movie was with Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone in a church. Bruce Willis (Mr. Church) is the man with a job offer and Stallone (Barney Ross) and Schwarzenegger (Mr. Trench) are the men bidding for that job. Barbs and jabs are traded between Barney Ross and Trench, but ultimately Trench leaves and Ross gets the job from Mr. Church. The whole scene lasted about 5 minutes, and it’s the only time that we see Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The thing I love about this scene is the fact that three of the most iconic action stars of my generation are standing in a room together and trading jabs at each other… well, mainly Stallone and Schwarzenegger. I suspect that the line about Trench wanting to be President is a reference to real life gossip about Schwarzenegger’s ambition of being President after he became the Governor of California.

Okay, so we’ve talked about 80’s action movie icons and kickass fight scenes. I’d elaborate on the mass explosions, but I’m pretty sure that’s self-explanatory. I’m positive there’s more to say about The Expendables, but I think its best that you watch the movie for yourselves. I wouldn’t want to ruin the experience, as it is a movie worth watching.

Satoshi Kon: 1963-2010

2010-08-24T15:59:00.000-07:00

This news makes me very, very sad. Satoshi Kon is one of my all-time favorite directors, not just in terms of animation, but in general. His films are brilliant as far as I'm concerned, and I can't believe I'll only get a handful of them. Maybe that's selfish of me, but I never knew Kon as a person so I can't feel his loss that way, but I knew him as a filmmaker and his loss as a visionary and as a director is one I will definitely feel. For anyone who hasn't seen his films, I'd recommend them very highly, even if you aren't a fan of animation. What he did with the medium is so unusual and his films themselves are so varied, it's hard for me to believe that someone wouldn't be able to find something worthwhile in them. I've already written a post on his films, and I was planning another one for my feminism in animation series, so I won't say much here. I guess I just wanted to put my regret at his passing out into the internet-ether, and hope that maybe someone out there would be interested in giving his work a shot.

Memories. His contribution to the short film Magnetic Rose was not as a director but as a writer and designer. I haven't seen it yet, but Stacy saw it years ago and told me about it, before I knew who Kon was. Even just the story stayed with me.

Perfect Blue (1999). His first directorial film, a psychological thriller that critiques Japanese pop media and the sexualization of female public figures. Mind-bending, upsetting, and rightfully compared to Hitchcock, this movie put Kon on the map. Director Darren Aronofsky paid for the rights to the film so he could use a scene from it for his film Requiem for a Dream.

Millennium Actress (2001). Widely regarded as his best film, though there is some contention to that. This is a romantic melodrama centered on a (fictional) legendary actress recounting her life for a documentary. It's really something else. If you decide to try a film, I'd recommend starting with this one. I have yet to meet someone who was unmoved by it. It also made Slant Magazine's list of best 100 films of the '00s at #30.

Tokyo Godfathers (2004). One of his more unusual films and one of the most overtly humanistic. The story of three homeless people in Tokyo on a journey to return an abandoned baby to her mother during the week in between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day. A screwball comedy that nonetheless doesn't shy away from the harsher aspects of the side of Tokyo no one ever makes films about. It highlights not only the homeless but South American migrant workers, transvestites and the gay subculture as well as youth violence. Yes, it really is a comedy.

Paprika (2008). An adventure science fiction film with a plot that's difficult to follow but really not as important to the film as it might seem. This one's very interesting when you get under the surface, especially when you hold it up to his previous films as a continuation of their themes and elements. Some people don't like it, I really do.

Paranoia Agent (2005). His only TV series, I'm only halfway through it but so far it's very, very good. A further continuation of his themes of fantasy and reality, media, and societal critique.

Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist by Andrew Osmond is a decent book I read for a paper I wrote spring quarter on Kon. For people interested in Kon's history and some insights into his work, it's not bad, though for scholarly papers it's on the light side.

Cinema Anime by Steven T. Brown has one article on Kon's work that I thought was quite good. It mostly compared his films to Hitchock's body of work and how certain themes and ideas related between the two.

A one-minute short film he wrote and directed for a compilation of animated shorts.

He was working on another film called The Dream Machine. I'm not sure if it got finished or not, but in case it gets a release, that's another one to watch for. It's supposed to be a children's movie.

Comments

2010-06-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no new fabulous post yet. I just wanted to let everyone know that I upped the security settings on the comments here, so I have to approve the comments before they show up. I've been deleting spam for months now and it's getting old. If I get tired of this method (which is very possible) I'll go back to the old way.

Diversion: My Favorite Video Games

2010-05-29T18:08:00.001-07:00

I'll get back to my Feminism in Animation series as soon as school's done raking me over the coals for a bit. Just to prove I'm not actually dead or something, here's a quick list of video games I like enough to play more than once. I'm hardly a gamer, but I do blow off a considerable amount of steam with my old standards here.

1. Katamari Damacy

This and its sequel, We Love Katamari, are not only fun and inventive, but addictive enough to play over and over. I've been playing one or the other of these games for probably about four years now and they're still fun. It's a little hard to describe what the point of the game is, since it's so bizarre you basically have to play it to understand. Basically, you are a tiny little green alien prince, and your dad's the King of All Cosmos. You'd barely fill his codpiece, and he never misses an opportunity to tell you what a huge (ha ha) disappointment you are, even when you're working your butt off to clean up his mess. It seems one night, dear ol' dad went on a bender and smashed up everything in the galaxy, and now its your job to make new stuff to replace it. How does one go about making new stars, constellations and planets, you ask? Why, take a little sticky ball called a katamari down to Earth and use it to roll up anything you can find until it's big enough, then shoot it into the sky. You roll up everything from bugs and thumbtacks to people, houses, and even continents. Naturally there's a time limit you have to beat, and even if you win the level, chances are high your katamari won't meet the King's standards and he'll give you some backhanded compliment about how he would have done it better. If you lose... you don't want to lose. Let's just put it that way. So really, the game's supposedly about rolling a bunch of weird stuff up into a ball to make a star, but really it's all about father-son bonding and family strife, mixed up with some really fun gameplay and some catchy Japanese pop/rock music. (Yeah, I know there's more of these games out there but I haven't played them yet.)

2. Okami

To list all the reasons I love this game would take me too long, so here's just the highlights. For starters, it's gorgeous. I love the stylized design for the characters, and the sumi-e look they gave everything, and some of the effects are just fantastic. Secondly, I love the inventive gameplay. Not only do you control a character in the game, but you can also control the elements as the wielder of a divine ink brush that literally draws the wind blowing or the trees blooming. Not to be left out, I love the story. It's like a giant mash-up of some of Japan's best-known folklore, and even though many of the stories have been tweaked with, it's still a lot of fun to have that moment of recognition when you figure out who a character is or what story you're involved in. It's deceivingly epic, too-- just when you think you've finished the game, you figure out you're not even halfway done with it. The premise is fairly simple: you are the sun goddess Amaterasu, on Earth in the avatar form of a white wolf in order to stop the rampaging evil that's been unleashed on Japan. You travel around smiting demons, helping villagers, solving puzzles, restoring dead trees and sacred pools, and regaining your power over nature by relearning divine brush techniques. You complete loads of mini-quests during your big one, and travel from one end of Japan to the other, encountering all sorts of people and animals along the way. It's incredibly addicting and tons of fun to play, or even just to watch. I only have it on the PS2, but I've heard the Wii version is pretty fun, too. I've also heard there's a sequel coming out for the DS, so I'm excited about that.

3. The Legend of Zelda

I'm not sure how many times I've beat this game, but it's quite a few. Yeah, I'm talking the original Nintendo, 8-bit graphics version. I don't know what it is about this game I like so much, but I find it tons of fun. I haven't played any of the other Zelda games, though I know people that like some of them quite a bit, so maybe I'll get around to it someday. For now, this one's satisfying enough for me. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good ol' days when this was the height of video game technology, but I never played this game much back when it was new. Maybe I'm just tickled that Zelda's named after F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a simple adventure story. Can't really put my finger on why I like this one so much, but I do anyway.

4. Space Invaders

Now this game was a huge part of my childhood. My brother had an Atari system and a bunch of games for it, and this was the one I played the most. Followed closely by some shooting game that had over 20 different styles of games that you'd go through and select, and I discovered I was really good at one of them (edit: I believe this game was known as Tank Plus). But that wasn't this game. This game, in all its simplicity, was the first game I can remember getting a callus from playing so much. Part of it was my desire to outdo my brother's old scores, but part of it was I just liked playing the game. There's something so ingeniously simple about it, and all these old games, that still makes them fun to play even with their primitive graphics. Like the developers were more concerned with stuff like making the game fun and not how realistic they could make it look. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy.

5. Lots of Games on the Atari 2600 I Never Played but that Have Awesome Names

I never played Tapeworm, but can only imagine what the plot of that was. Or Tax Avoiders, which seems to be a little human figure trying to gather money while avoiding what appear to be snakes, what might be either a spider or a large asterisk, and what I'm assuming is the tax man. I can't really tell, though. Plaque Attack looks like a similar idea to Space Invaders, only instead of a cannon, you're a tube of toothpaste defending two rows of teeth from floating junk food. Atariage.com has tons of these old games listed and I have to assume that they're probably more fun to imagine than they were to actually play, but you never know.

Review: "How To Train Your Dragon"

2010-03-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

Well it finally happened. Dreamworks Animation finally nailed it. Kung Fu Panda set the bar for the studio as far as I'm concerned, and How to Train Your Dragon raised it.

I feel I should preface this by saying that I had no idea what to expect going into this movie. I hadn't seen many ads or any trailers for it, and barely knew it existed until just a few months ago. I knew nothing of the plot aside from the fact that there were vikings and dragons, and everything I'd seen looked pretty fun and silly. I didn't know Chris Sanders and Dean DeBloise (whose work you might know from Lilo and Stitch-- which I will coincidentally be writing about in my feminism in animation series) were the co-writers and directors, I didn't know anything about the voice casting (surprisingly and refreshingly skimpy on the celebrity names), and I sure didn't expect it to be so moving. Directors like Sanders and Dean, and Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) keep treating their audiences like they actually have brains and emotional intellect, and have studios capable of producing animation quality that backs those things up, hopefully more animation directors will follow suit.

So, having gone into the movie with very little in the way of expectations other than maybe some silly comedy and lots of wisecracks-- it's Dreamworks, after all, that's usually what they base their movies around-- I was not prepared for the movie I actually saw. It had its funny moments, certainly, with nary a fart joke or pop culture reference to be found, but it wasn't a wacky comedy like what I'd been expecting. The story itself is really basic, and yeah there are loads of predictable tropes like 'the coming of age story', 'the geeky guy likes the popular girl', 'a boy and his dog', 'teenager emotionally estranged from parent/s who don't understand him', 'the dork who doesn't fit in because he's too different', and so on. And yeah, one of the big underlying messages of the movie is the typical 'just be true to yourself', but it's actually really underplayed in favor of something that usually gets less focus: 'learning to understand something differently'.

The main character, Hiccup, is from a tribe of Vikings (who speak with Scottish accents for some reason) who raise sheep, build houses, and kill dragons. Mostly the latter, although the house building is tied in with that as well. Their village is constantly raided by dragons who carry off their sheep, and the Vikings are experienced enough with killing them that they have some classifications and techniques for each species, and even have a right of passage tradition that involves training to fight and eventually kill them. Hiccup, a small, skinny teenager who isn't understood or respected by anyone, especially his father, the village leader and big brawny tough guy, wants more than anything to kill a dragon and earn some respect and affection. He isn't strong enough to wield his own weapon, but he's clever enough to design a catapult to do it for him, and manages to down a member of the most mysterious and enigmatic of the dragon species, the Night Fury. When he finally finds the injured dragon, he finds he can't bring himself to kill it, and instead starts observing and eventually befriending it. What he learns about dragon behavior is often at direct odds with what he's being taught in dragon training, but through his understanding of dragon behavior, he's able to rise to the top his class despite his complete lack of warrior prowess.

Meanwhile, he's also figured out how to repair the injury to the dragon-- now named Toothless-- which is able to properly fly again with teamwork. The flight scenes are amazingly well-done, not only because they're beautiful in and of themselves, but because they drive home the beauty of the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless. We get to experience the exhilaration they both feel at getting to fly right along with them, and the fear they both feel when they fall. Hiccup's actions have made him responsible for Toothless, and Toothless in turn helps validate Hiccup's unconventional ways and gives him a kind of freedom and perspective he couldn't have achieved on his own. Neither one can reach their full potential without the other, and the flight scenes drive that home beautifully without a word.

I also really liked that they didn't shy away from the potential consequences of Hiccup's actions, and there are some surprises toward the end. In retrospect, they probably shouldn't have been as surprising as they were, but at the same time, it happens so rarely in movies for younger audiences-- or even older ones for that matter-- that it took me off guard. There's a more mature sensibility at the heart of the movie that is refreshing in general, and most certainly so for Dreamworks animation. It's a fun movie, but it's not afraid to get into some more serious issues for the sake of more emotional integrity. I highly recommend seeing it, and especially in 3D, which isn't something I typically recommend. I've never seen a movie in 3D in the theater, and I usually don't feel like I'm missing out on that much, but I do regret not seeing this one in it. I actually forgot it was supposed to be in 3D until I was leaving the theater and saw the sign on the poster that said it was in 2D only. No gratuitous things flying toward the camera for the sake of a gimmick, I get the impression this 3D was used intelligently, to heighten the experiences of the characters onscreen for the audience.

So in summary, this movie will likely be compared to a lot of other movies out there. Some of the comparisons will be fair, some will not, but to take the film only on the basis of its tropes (of which there are many) leaves out how those tropes are presented. All movies and stories work with tropes, either by employing them or defying them. It's in the execution that makes the difference as to how an audience will respond to it-- whether attention was paid to the characters and an investment in having the audience care about them is paramount for me. It's clear the filmmakers here cared about Hiccup and Toothless and their bond is the biggest focus in the film. That's why it works as well as it does, and that's why any of it means anything. For me, the execution here was good. They cared about the characters, they cared about what they were trying to say, and they cared about whether or not the audience cared about the same things.

Wait, What's Wrong With Being a Girl, Again?

2010-03-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

(Not officially a part of my series on feminism in animation, although it certainly applies. Just a quick rant.)

So, as most people who might care probably already know, Disney's changed the title of its upcoming movie Rapunzel to the more gender-neutral Tangled. In and of itself, I guess not that big a deal, it's got a certain catch to it, slightly more engaging to a modern audience since it's an adjective, not a noun. Whatever. But then why did they decide to change the content of the movie too? According to the interviews I've read, they're beefing up the role of the heroic prince guy and giving him lots more action scenes. Okay, I'm all for equal character development (which is not what "swashbuckling action" means, btw), but why are they changing so much so suddenly, and especially less than a year before the movie opens?

"We didn't want to be put in a box," according to Ed Catmull, president of Disney and Pixar's animation department (via the LA Times). "Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody."

Translation: "The Princess and the Frog underperformed (ie: only made ~$220 million worldwide) and like we always do, we're blaming something totally arbitrary on the failure instead of our story department and our marketing strategy."

Remember back when they announced they were closing their traditional animation studios in favor of switching to digital animation? Their reasoning there was that everyone else's CG-animated movies were making money and their traditional ones weren't, therefore it must be that traditional animation as a medium is dead and not that the movies themselves had issues. Only now, instead of blaming traditional animation for the "failure" of their blockbuster movie, they're blaming it on the fact that boys won't go see a movie with the word "princess" in the title.

Or, apparently, "Rapunzel". (Which the semantic in me must point out is a kind of leafy green plant people use in salads, not a fancy word for "princess".)

So now, instead of the method of animation at fault, it's the fact that it's about a girl. I keep forgetting that girls aren't regular people who can be easily identified with by people of either gender, like boys can. See, when you make a movie with a girl in the lead part, and it's about "girl" stuff like romance and magic (as 99% of lead-women movies are), it means it's a "chick flick" and the only acceptable guy audience members are the ones dragged there by their girlfriends and who spend every second of its run-time in sheer emotional anguish. Because everyone knows that girl things are silly and emasculating and real men only tolerate it for the sake of sex.

But when a movie comes out with a guy in the lead and it's about "guy" stuff like adventure and action, it's totally cool for girls to like that, too, because when we say "guy", we really mean "everybody". Because guy stuff is the default, "non-gendered" stuff, and "girl" stuff is for sissy, fluffies who like glitter and shoes. And in case you're confused by that, "glitter" and "shoes" and everything else associated with being feminine are less important, interesting, relevant, and acceptable to enjoy because they are silly and beneath all the relevant "boy" stuff like explosions and car chases.

Thank you, Disney, for reminding me that girls are silly and nobody wants to watch movies about them. It's a really good thing you remembered, too, before releasing another movie that will only make a few hundred million dollars because there wasn't enough boy-time and we all know that the only way to relate to a girl character is to be a girl yourself. I mean it's not like they're real people or anything.

(Just for the sake of clarification: I do not assume this of all males, and in fact I think it's pretty demeaning to assume they're all this shallow, but there's a lot of cultural pressure and influence out there that supports the "girls are silly and you shouldn't like anything aimed at them" mentality. I don't know which I find more insulting, the idea that all guys must think this way, or the fact that there are evidently so many who do. And they're not the only ones! There are loads of girls out there who feel the exact same way due to the same social stigma. I was one of them for a very long time. Hence the bitter.)

(Another clarification: I have big issues with the so-called "chick flicks", too, and the predominance of princesses in animated movies. Not because I think femininity in and of itself is demeaning, but because of how "appropriate" femininity is showcased in them, and the almost complete lack of anything else for female consumers. I'm of the opinion that people who genuinely like the glittery princess thing, rock on. But limiting the idea of "girl" to just that is... limiting. Girls can be foofy princesses, and they can be other things, too! We have LOADS of princesses already, maybe we can explore, I don't know, something else for a change?)

Feminism in Animation: "Disney's Hercules" (the series)

2010-03-17T03:15:00.000-07:00

This series really never got the recognition it deserved when it was on back in 1998, and I'm really doubtful that it'll ever make it to DVD despite a fan following and a ton of celebrity voice talent. I found it to be a pretty clever series, especially since I'm a huge fan of Greek mythology and I love that the writers clearly studied it and involved it heavily in the plots of the series. It's not always accurate, of course, since it's Disney and an animated daytime show aimed at children, but they actually got away with a fair amount, and you can tell they went to the myths first. It's actually pretty cool, since the original myths were largely pretty woman-phobic, anyway. Don't believe me? Take a look at all the female monsters those strapping demigod heroes had to go defeat, like gorgons, sirens, harpies, dracaenae, scylla, maenades, sphinx, Amazons, and the list goes on. (Note: I'm not saying all the monsters were female, but there were a lot of them, and there's a lot of symbolism involved in terms of taming/conquering female power, especially sexuality, which actually lines up with the role and treatment of women in ancient Greek society, too.)

The basic premise, as with most Disney TV adaptations of their movies, is setting Hercules (Tate Donovan) in high school during his awkward adolescent phase. Despite being a demi-god and the son of Zeus, he's pretty much a social outcast and his only steady friends are Icarus (French Stewart), the boy who flew too close to the sun on wax wings and who now seems to be permanently fried physically and mentally, and Cassandra (Sandra Bernhard), a pessimistic, sarcastic, and downright acidic young woman who's cursed to have unerring visions of future catastrophe, but who will never be believed if she tries to warn anyone about them. Cassandra alone's a great feminist character because, as might be surmised by the casting choice, she's a smart, outspoken, independent woman with a lot more on her mind than just dating and shopping. In fact she only dates one character in the entire show and that was only for two episodes-- this is in spite of Icarus's conviction that they're a couple and his stalking and obsessive behavior towards her, while not portrayed as anything other than annoying and basically harmless, isn't touted as building up to a true love match for them, either. She rejects him constantly and never capitulates to dating him or seems interested in him in that respect at all, which is nice. In fact, the character she winds up dating is very similar to him in a lot of ways, but importantly, he's not obsessive or clingy or possessive. Of course it's played for laughs and Bernhard goes completely over the top with her syrupy lovesick voice, but I think it's interesting that it seems to be Icarus's stalker-like behavior that's his biggest obstacle with her.

Icarus, for his part, is also pretty cool when not latched onto Cassandra, since he doesn't seem to pay much heed to constructed gender roles at all-- he's often shown to be more creative, nurturing, and domestically-minded, and never self-conscious about it. Of course he's also delusional and often has very bad ideas that get him into trouble, but it's still cool that he's totally at peace with his masculine and feminine sides.

There are several specific episodes that deal directly with feminist issues, especially anytime the Amazon Tempest (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is featured. One episode, The Girdle of Hyppolyte, dealt with Hercules having issues with his “Home Grecinomics” class (ha ha, puns) because he didn't feel like he should have to do “women's work” like cooking. He winds up following Tempest back to her home because he thinks she's in danger and winds up at odds with the Amazonian ruler, Hyppolyte (Jane Curtain). Banished to the kitchen to do “men's work”, he meets Tempest's father, King Darius (Emeril Lagasse) and learns that cooking and homemaking aren't gender-specific, nor are they inherently demeaning. They stay clear of more prickly topics like reinforcing the gender binary and its inherent struggle for dominance, and the idea that homemaking as a full-time job isn't regarded any more highly in the matriarchy than in the patriarchy, but the ideas are in there if anyone stops to read between the lines. Pretty subversive for a daytime animated kid's show.

It also takes on the Pygmalion myth, which has become popularized these days in movies like My Fair Lady and Annie Hall (which is a great movie, by the way). The basic story of the original myth is that the sculptor Pygmalion found every woman he saw to be inadequate next to his idea of what they should be, so sculpts himself his perfect woman. During his sculpting, he becomes so besotted with his creation, Aphrodite takes pity on him and brings the statue Galatea to life. The episode The Dream Date plays on this, even having Pygmalion be the school's art teacher with the improbably attractive wife (who is never named), but instead of a dissatisfaction with women in general, Hercules's problem is his inability to get a date for a school dance. Inspired by the art teacher's story, he sneaks into the art room and sculpts a woman out of clay, hoping to invoke Aphrodite (Lisa Kudrow) to bring her to life so he can have a date. As exacting and specific about what he wants her to be like physically, he is equally as uninterested in her personality, and just asks that she be “crazy about [him]”. Naturally, things go awry when Galatea (Jennifer Aniston) is clingy, obsessive, possessive to the point of violence with any other girl who so much as says boo to him, and even winds up rigging the election for the king and queen of the dance. When Herc tries to break up with her (by restraining her and dropping her on a remote island), she's completely undeterred and makes her way back to the dance. Long story short, the dance is ruined, the building catches on fire, and because she's made of clay, she winds up hardened into a statue. Realizing his mistake with the helpful prodding of his friends (Cassandra even gets to say the word “sexist” in a Disney cartoon), he asks Aphrodite to give Galatea the ability to be her own person, which is granted; however instead of getting the real date he's hoping for, Herc instead gets the very same break-up speech he'd given her earlier in the episode right before she runs off to find “that hunky Ajax”. All in all, the message there is pretty clear, and I think the episode presents it in a fun and not-too preachy way: women are their own people, not soulless dolls for men to use to satisfy their lust with and project their fantasies onto-- and yes, that means that they might choose to date someone else, no matter how nice a guy you might be. Seems simple, right? Sadly, in the words of Aphrodite, “not everyone gets the lesson.”(may be nsfw)

Other notable examples from the show include:

Hecate (Perri Gilpin), a disgruntled Underworld employee who's sick of getting very little recognition for her work and is trying to unseat Hades much the same way Hades is trying to unseat Zeus-- frankly in some ways she may actually be more qualified to run the Underworld than he is, not the least of which because she actually wants the job. She creates the unique situation of putting Hades in a vulnerable and even sympathetic position at times, while at the same time, the viewer can also sympathize with Hecate's frustration at her lack of respect and power. I wish she'd been around more, she was interesting. Episode to try: The Underworld Takeover

Athena (Jane Leeves), as the patron goddess of Athens shows up more than once, and is always amusing since she's usually smarter than anyone in the room, and usually in a competitive relationship with her twin brother Ares (Jay Thomas). I like her because she can compete with him in physical areas (they were both patrons of war and combat), but not at the expense of knowledge, wisdom, and reason. I also like that she seems to love irritating everyone by being a smarty pants a lot. Episode to try: The Big Games

Artemis (Reba Macentire), as the goddess of the hunt, is only in two episodes or so, but is knee-slappingly funny most of the time. Interestingly, the writers dug out this old myth about Orion, the legendary hunter of constellation fame, and she having an affair of some sort, in contrast to her more typical virgin status. But in typical Reba fashion, Artemis is straight-shootin', down-home wisdom, and prone to raising her voice when someone isn't listening to her. Episode to try: The Boar Hunt

Elektra (Jennifer Tilly), interestingly having nothing to do with her mythical counterpart, this Elektra is a goth/beatnik girl that Herc's interested in. The problem is, she hates guys like him and wants nothing to do with him until he starts trying to adopt her counter-culture lifestyle. Oh yeah, and she summons “furies” (bird-like monsters) when she gets angry for some reason. What's interesting about this is that the episode doesn't seem to come down firmly on one side or the other here; she isn't really vilified for her viewpoints, and Herc doesn't seem to learn much of a lesson beyond 'don't pretend to be someone you're not to fit in'. They butt heads constantly about their life views but neither one wins the other over, and they part still not seeing eye to eye, but it's actually a more realistic ending than everyone magically getting along after seeing the error of their ways. Episode to try: The Complex Elektra

Medusa (Jennifer Love Hewett), in a big nod to The Little Mermaid, is a lonely soul who longs for a connection with someone without turning them to stone. When given the choice between a human makeover that lasts from sunup to sundown in exchange for doing work for Hades, or a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses that keep her look from turning things to stone from Aphrodite, she takes what really does seem like the better deal and goes with Hades. She fits in when she goes to school, has friends, gets the start of a romance with Hercules, but after a serious anxiety attack when she hears Herc talk callously about learning to kill gorgons in his training, she decides to tell him who she is. It's an interesting episode and the only one I can recall offhand that focuses more on the emotional journey of a one-shot character than the protagonists. I remember that one being somewhat controversial in the fanbase when it first aired, since some people found Aphrodite's solution to be too optimistic in the face of overwhelming cultural bias against 'monsters', but there is also something to be said for the basic lesson of not trying to pretend to be someone you aren't just to gain acceptance. It's too bad she was only in one episode, since by the end of it, only Hercules was shown to be accepting of her, and it never says what happened after that. Episode to try: The Gorgon

As noted before, this series isn't available on DVD, nor is it likely to be for at least a very long time, if ever. Fortunately, some episodes are available on at least one popular movie sharing online community, and to the best of my knowledge, it's in reruns on one of the Disney channels, although I think some of the episodes have been edited since their initial airing. It's not a perfect show; the animation's pretty hit or miss, and some episodes are definitely better than others, but I thought overall it was pretty clever, especially if you're familiar with Greek mythology and history already. If not, it's a fun introduction, and it's a great way to play 'spot the celebrity guest voice', too.

Feminism in Animation: "Slayers"

2010-03-08T22:34:00.000-08:00

This is basically the sum of a bunch of different thoughts I've had bouncing around in my brain for a while. For a while I've been wanting to highlight some media products from Asian cultures, most specifically Japan since it's the one I'm most familiar with, that feature strong feminist themes, and since it's International Women's Day, what better time to kick it off? There's this prevailing idea floating around that Eastern cultures are more “backwards” and oppressive toward women than we are in the West, and while there are certainly problems in Asian countries in regards to gender equality, I really can't say the West is any better in many ways. It's an unfair viewpoint, and I've been wanting to challenge it for a while now, but I also want to talk about some feminist viewpoints from Western media products, specifically in terms of animation. For the purposes of this list, I'm looking specifically at Disney products, since Disney is very often viewed as being un-feminist, which is fair, but that's ignoring the feminist ideas that do exist there as well. So this is my list. It leaves out a bunch, I'm sure, but these are the TV shows, movies, and comics that I'm most familiar with and have the strongest ideas on. My goal here isn't to compare these shows with each other and try to rate how each culture is doing, my goal is simply to examine them in their own rights and maybe provide a different viewpoint or raise awareness of a product that might be less known.

Slayers
The first anime I ever saw that I actually liked, and to this day I still enjoy it, even the dated parts. Originally based on a series of novels by Kanzaka Hajime with illustrations by Araizumi Rui, Slayers is an epic fantasy adventure story that in part spoofs epic fantasy stories, while at the same time creating its own story with messages all its own. It's a great adventure saga, full of humor, action, at times suspense, and loads of great characters. Kanzaka really created his own world, with its own history, culture, and mythology, and even an intricate and fascinating system of magic, with sub-groups and spells that clearly do their own different things, and that interact with each other in different ways. And at fifteen original novels, and over thirty spin-off novels, not to mention the comics and anime series that spun off from those, there's plenty that gets explored. I especially love that this series is proof that the idea that 'guys don't identify with female protagonists' is bunk because not only is the lead character in this series a female, but the novels are written in first-person perspective. So not only did Kanzaka, a man, write a lead female character convincingly and uncondescendingly, but it became one of the biggest hits of the '90s in Japan, with four TV seasons (to date), countless manga spinoffs, a string of direct-to-DVD releases, successful movies, radio dramas, and hit songs, to say nothing of the merchandise that must have been produced. To this day it has an enduring fanbase, enough to warrant a fourth TV season years after the previous one aired. Lina Inverse is an anime icon because she's a fantastic character, and the series is full of many more.

In the novels Lina describes herself as a petite, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl of fifteen or sixteen who's been traveling for years already-- gradually her hair and eyes were both lightened to a dramatic red, which admittedly does suit her personality more. She's not on some grand quest to save the world-- although she does usually wind up doing it anyway-- she's doing it because she loves adventure, kicking the butts of roving tribes of bandits (and making herself money in the process) and building up her reputation as a sorceress. By the time she's in her mid-teens, her name is already feared far and wide and she's almost a living legend-- although not quite in the way she'd wanted, since her nickname Dra-Mata (“dragon spooker”) is less flattering than her own title of “beautiful sorcery genius”, and she's very often regarded as a public menace. She has an ego the size of a small state, but the thing is, she really is a genius. She is a force of nature to be reckoned with, both in terms of her magical power (which is portrayed literally as an atomic explosi on in the anime), but in terms of her personality. She's loud, brash, egotistical, angry, opinionated, educated, fearless, ambitious, greedy, hardworking, adventurous, confident, funny, and totally relentless. And yet, as much as she brags about how gorgeous she is, it overlays this insecurity about her figure, since she's willowy and petite and seems to be surrounded by women far more well-endowed than she is. She's awkward and shy when it comes to things like romance and tries to avoid thinking or talking about it at all, let alone pursuing it. Her temper is legendarily short, and she's been known to blow up entire villages just to let off steam when she gets riled up, which only contributes to her reputation as a menace to society in general. She's very well-versed in magical theory as well as folklore and legends, and will often explain things to less-educated people. She also loves food and has been known to put away as much as twenty helpings in one sitting, which I believe was once attributed to the amount of magic energy she channels on a regular basis. Her abilities with magic, especially black (destructive) magic are astonishing for someone of her age; her signature spell is incredibly powerful, and one only a handful of people in the world know, but there's one even more powerful that she herself managed to figure out on her own that taps into energy so powerful it can destroy the planet if miscast. She's also tactically very savvy and will use creative and unorthodox methods of solving problems and getting out of trouble.

I could go on and on about how much I love her and all her foibles and shortcomings and amazing humanness, but she's also far from the only worthy female character in this series. In Lina's earlier wandering days, she had a sometime traveling companion/rival in Naga the Serpent, another powerful sorceress looking to establish a name for herself-- the fact that the name she establishes is "goldfish poop", after the way she follows Lina around, doesn't seem to slow her down much. Naga is a largely comedic character, with many moments of supreme idiocy (poking her own cheeks with her spiked shoulder pads while casting a spell springing immediately to mind), and an outfit that defies nearly every rule of practicality and common sense, but there's a lot more to her than that. She does come off like an idiot a lot of the time, but I don't think she really is-- she's shown frequently to also be pretty canny and proves a good foil for Lina a lot of the time. She's a skilled magician, especially with nature-related magic, and her blistering confidence and complete lack of self-doubt about anything is really pretty cool when you step back and look at her. The signature laugh that drives sane people mad at the sound is the manifestation of that confidence, and it's what drives her tenacity, her ability to wear that ridiculous outfit without shame, her ambition, and her ability to drive Lina absolutely crazy. It's never directly stated anywhere, but there are big hints dropped that she's actually the older sister of another main character, Amelia, and the crown princess of a very powerful kingdom. She left home after witnessing the murder of her mother, which is why she faints at the sight of blood, and seems to prefer the life of a wandering adventurer to that of being royalty, although she's hardly lost the viewpoint of the upper echelon of society. She is also a woman who loves her alcohol, and delights in stealing Lina's food when the opportunity presents itself.

Amelia Wil Tesla Seillune is the next most prominent female character in the story, especially in the anime. Back when I was first into the series, she was widely despised by the fanbase, and I'm glad to see that's died out now because she's a great character. Amelia is a princess of the kingdom of Seillune, a large and powerful country that specializes in white (protective/healing) magic. The kingdom even has a series of walls built through and around it in the shape of a protective charm. Amelia is a very powerful white magic priestess, but she also has a great deal of proficiency in shaman (nature) magic, which gives her a greater diversity of spells to draw on than Lina in some ways. She's also an accomplished physical fighter, but has an inexplicable need to climb on the top of something tall and give righteous lectures to villains about justice before entering the fight-- also she will frequently fall off the tall things and land on her head, which often ruins much of her credibility as a threat. A year or two younger than Lina, she's a bit shorter than her, but with much more curve in her figure, which a thorn in Lina's side from time to time. Like her other family members, Amelia has a love of adventure and travel, but she also feels a great sense of responsibility to her kingdom, and so frequently returns home to take up her political and diplomatic duties instead. Raised by her father after her mother was murdered when she was small, she has a very strong sense of filial duty, and takes after her father in many ways, not the least of which are exuberance and an iron-clad belief in justice. Once stated that she didn't want to be the princess who gets rescued, but rather the prince who saves the damsel in distress, and very often refers to herself as a warrior of justice. Is probably the most naive character in the entire series, but grows considerably during its course into someone with a lot of sense and diplomacy, an even temper, and a really formidable opponent in both court politics and battle.

Sylphiel Nels Radha is the least like any of the other major female characters in the series. She's the epitome of the “ideal” woman and everything Lina isn't; kind, gentle, nurturing, domestic, beautiful, graceful, soft-spoken, shy, obedient, dutiful, sweet, and friendly. Lina hates her instantly, but that's likely due in large part to Sylphiel's very overt designs on Lina's traveling companion and romantic interest, Gourry, and Lina's own buried insecurities. A very powerful white magic priestess, Sylphiel lives in a legendary city that once saw the destruction of a major demon and is renowned for its holy tree that played a large part in that battle. Though she starts out as the obligatory rival character, she soon starts taking on her own life, after enduring an unimaginable tragedy and playing a very important role in the defeat of a major demon. Little tidbits of her past and hidden parts of her personality are revealed slowly, and they add a nice dimension to her, even though she's still not one of the more well-developed characters in the series. But she serves her purpose well and even offers a number of surprises toward the end of the second anime season that showcase just how far she's willing to push herself for the sake of her own dreams. A character that, similar to her namesake Radha from the Hindu tradition, is completely devoted to the object of her love, but is doomed to a life of loneliness, waiting for the love of a man she'll never get. Even though she knows this, she still doesn't back away, and even then never bears Lina any ill will or overt resentment about it. She brings out the insecurities in Lina as she would in anyone, since she is too good to be real, and yet you can't help but feel badly for her since she's lost everything she cherished and deserves much better than the lot she's been given. She is the character who seems most fragile, and yet is able to endure the unendurable and keep moving forward without losing her kindness.

There are more supporting characters that are worth discussing, as the series ran for a long time and had a huge supporting cast, but these are the major female ones. I love the cast for its diversity, and for the sense of human-ness that abounds in each one of them. Some characters are tragic, some comic, some both, some tomboys, some feminine girls, but none are invalidated or made lesser because of their traits. There was clearly thought put into each of them, and while they might seem on the surface like the embodiment of long-standing tropes, each has qualities that defy their categorizations and raise them up into something more thoughtful and interesting. It's also just a great overall series, full of cosmic battles between Good and Evil, silly side-quests, giant slugs, lots of magic, a little romance here and there, complicated family ties, loads of silly gags, lots of food, and plenty of concussions. I still have fun with it even ten years after the fact.

That Sentimental Feeling

2010-02-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

So it's Valentine's Day, a holiday I used to hold in the highest contempt for all the trendy reasons-- 'I don't need a special day to remind me about love', 'it's just a commercialized holiday designed to get people to spend money they don't need to', 'conventional romance is stupid and I'm so much better than that', yadda yadda. While I don't really celebrate it, I have gotten over my contempt for it and don't see anything wrong with people wanting to appreciate their significant others any day they choose. (And really, it's not like it's hard to find commercialized holidays of any sort these days, not just this one.)

However, having said all that, I do still hold most romantic comedies in pretty high disdain. Not because I think it makes me cool or smart, but because I find them to be insulting to my intelligence (and often even my gender) and I simply don't enjoy watching them. I especially hate the version of "romance" they present as anything even remotely approaching healthy or charming, and would run screaming in terror from most of the lead characters should I ever manage to meet one in reality. These people are not healthy, and I resent the idea that I'm supposed to root for them to get together with the other screwed up person and make sociopathic babies. Very often this gets me branded as a non-romantic, and if the examples in movies like How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days or The Proposal are considered real romance, then that's fine with me. But that's not to say that I've never enjoyed an onscreen couple, there are many that I find charming for a number of reasons. So if anyone's looking for something maybe a little off the beaten track to snuggle up with their special someone with, you might give one of these a glance.

Stranger Than Fiction
This charming, genre-defying movie is one that works on just about every level for me, from the tone to the performances, to the quirky plot and its trust in the audience to get the jokes without flashing neon signs. One of my favorite aspects of it is the relationship between mildly OCD IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrel in a surprisingly restrained and nuanced performance) and Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the sleeve-tattooed "anarchist" baker whom he's auditing. On paper they might be your standard romantic couple trope of the people who start out hating each other but then inexplicably fall in love, but on screen, something much more interesting happens. They're charming people. Ana is understandably upset with Harold when he shows up to audit her and makes no effort to hide her anger, and Harold promptly sticks his foot very far down his mouth, and then stares at her breasts in the process. Instead of being played for big laughs, it's a humiliating awkward scene that feels more true than if it were trying to be funny. I have to say that I love the casting choices, too-- neither Ferrell nor Gyllenhaal are what would be considered conventionally attractive on the scale that most romantic comedy stars are, and that's part of what makes them so endearing. In her first appearance, Anna is less than ingratiating since she's yelling at Harold, and yet you can tell he's completely taken with her anyway. If this were Kate Hudson, not only would she be less intimidating but Harold's attraction would feel more shallow and superficial. Gyllenhaal not only isn't afraid to be abrasive, sardonic, and even unpleasant at times, she still manages to be likable, understandable, and very much a person who knows who she is and what she wants and who isn't required to change that for the movie to work. She and Harold don't spend the whole movie hating each other, or trying to trick the other one into dating them, or avoiding their feelings, and it's really refreshing to watch their relationship take its natural course.

A tip: Mix up some chocolate chip cookie dough and keep it in the fridge until after the movie. You will want a warm, gooey cookie straight from the oven like crazy by the end of this.

3-Iron (Bin Jip)
This movie took me really off-guard the first time I saw it. Based on the title, I was expecting some sort of golf movie, and while the sport does play a part in the film, it's not at all what I was expecting. The story is about a young man who breaks into people's houses while they're away, but instead of stealing their things, he repairs broken appliances and does their laundry in exchange for eating their food and using their homes. There's not explanation as to why he does this, he's a college graduate who rides a nice motorcycle and seems by all other accounts to be pretty normal. One day he breaks into a really upscale place, not knowing that the wife of the man who owns it is still inside. Clearly abused and battered, she watches him go about his normal routine of doing laundry, cooking, and repairing her bathroom scale, and never calls the cops or tries to escape. When her husband comes home, they fight again and she leaves with the younger man to accompany him on his routine of living in other people's homes while they're away. What follows is probably one of the sweetest, most tender and mutually respectful relationships I've ever seen on screen. It's all done without a word exchanged between the two, leaving one wondering how necessary words really are in understanding who someone is. For anyone not familiar with Buddhism, it might be a bit confusing at the end, but the whole movie is basically a Buddhist parable. It's a gentle, loving look at how people are capable of relating to each other in ways we don't often consider, and a reminder of how our actions influence the lives of those around us. "Haunting" is probably the best word I've heard to describe it.

When Harry Met Sally
I saw Norah Ephron in an interview once stating that she thought the ending to this movie (which she wrote, in case you didn't know) was unrealistic, and I'd agree, but there's something that's still so much fun about watching these two idiosyncratic people go through different phases of their lives, become friends, and eventually lovers. He's neurotic, cynical, and reads the endings of books before everything else in case he dies before finishing the book, whereas she is optimistic, confident, and likes to order food in very specific, exacting terms. They're both flawed and quirky but not unpleasant and you don't feel guilty rooting for them to them to get over themselves enough to get together. Even though it was made in the late 1980s it still holds up and I found it to be a genuinely entertaining movie when I watched it with my mom a few months back.

Amelie
Movies don't get much quirkier than this, or more evocative of the little pleasures in life that we often don't notice, like the feeling of sticking your hand in a basket of dried beans, or eating fresh raspberries off your fingers. The title character is odd, to say the least, and she lives a somewhat reclusive life in her little Paris apartment. There is a romance of sorts with a man she sees in the train station one day, but really, this movie is more of a romance with life and its oddities, tiny pleasures, and unnoticed opportunities.

The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret)
Not a romance as much as a sweet moment between two people who cannot be together due to life circumstances just as much as who they each are. It doesn't focus on the idea of 'what might have been' or lament the missing of an opportunity, but instead quietly revels in the beauty of the connection that was briefly made. It's a wonderfully sweet movie, full of hope and idealism for two cultures that despise each other so fiercely in reality. It's not a realistic movie in that sense, but it is an optimistic one. Sasson Gabai and Ronit Elkabetz give wonderful performances as two lonely people who happen to share one evening in each other's company, then each go on their way to wherever they were going.

Chungking Express
The first time I saw this, I described it as the Chinese version of Amelie, and there are some similarities, but really, they are their own unique movies. This one actually has two stories, both involving lovelorn policemen meeting someone new. The first cop meets a woman who, unbeknownst to him, happens to be involved in a drug smuggling syndicate and is on the run after a job goes bad. The second cop just got dumped by a flight attendant and catches the attention of a young woman working at the fast food place he frequents. This is the story that's Amelie-esque (even though this movie came out before Amelie), in that this young woman takes it upon herself to interfere with the cop's life in unusual ways, doing little things to break him out of his routine and help him move on from his past relationship. It's also really interesting in how it plays with time and makes you aware of the timing of things, and how sometimes when a moment passes us by, it's not always a bad thing or a good thing. Sometimes things just are what they are and it doesn't mean they have more or less value in life.

Moonstruck
Yeah, yeah, I know, but I can't help it, I love watching this movie. I love the overblown emotion and the goofy characters and the food, food, food, and the sheer operatic nature of it all. It's just fun, and the cynical view of life, death, and love is so funny because they managed to not overdo it. Everyone's theatrical and overblown, but somehow it all works. Cher's classic "snap out of it!" line still kills me every time.

Not A Review: "Shutter Island"

2010-02-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge horror movie person, admittedly, but I've been interested in seeing this one since I saw a short trailer for it last month. I'll freely admit that the idea of Martin Scorsese tackling a psychological thriller/haunted asylum story is intriguing, and I'm a sucker for period pieces, so sign me up, I'll give it a whirl. Then today when I was perusing my usual blogs on my lunch break, I happened across a piece of trivia I wasn't aware of: the screenwriter for it is a woman, Laeta Kalogridis. Okay, vaguely interesting, but I've never heard of her so I have no opinion one way or the other, really. Except that I am familiar with some of her work without even realizing it. It turns out that she worked with James Cameron for something like eight years on the script for Avatar, only she doesn't have a credit for it in the movie. Okay, I still haven't seen it, but from everything I've heard, even from people who liked it, that the script itself is no great shakes, it's the visuals and experience that make the movie worth watching. So hmm, not sure how I feel about that, but it's just one movie, and I don't know how much she had to do with the end result, right?

Turns out she also wrote Oliver Stone's epic, Alexander, too. I didn't see all of it, but I did catch part of it on TV when I visited Greece a few years back and despite it being the only thing on in English, I kept changing the channel because watching talk shows in Greek was more entertaining. But hey, maybe I didn't give it a fair shot, and it's not like the script is the be-all end-all of the end result of a movie, right?

So she also executively produced the TV shows Birds of Prey and the reboot of The Bionic Woman. I didn't watch the second, but I have yet to come across someone who did and liked it, and I tried so hard to like Birds of Prey when it was on, I really did. It just... wasn't good. Not even so bad it was entertaining, it was poorly handled on just about every level save for a few of the casting decisions. But hey, maybe she's a better writer than a producer.

She also worked on the Tomb Raider movie and Scream 3 in some unspecified capacity. Now, I will admit that I do own a copy of the Tomb Raider movie, but I also freely admit it's not a good movie. It's one of those guilty pleasure movies that everyone has where you love it against all better judgment and you're not able to explain why. Scream 3 I saw and I remember being bitterly disappointed in nearly all the way through.

According to IMDB, she also wrote the screenplay for Night Watch (the Russian movie, not the Ewan McGregor, Nick Nolte movie from a while back), and Pathfinder (based on a Norwegian movie, this one is about a Viking boy left behind after his clan fights with a Native American tribe and later on becomes their savior in fending off more Vikings-- sounds vaguely familiar...), neither of which I've seen so I can't say anything about them. They might be good, I have no clue, but I have to say, so far I'm not impressed with her resume. I'm still going to see Shutter Island and hope it's better than the other movies she's written have been on average, but still, yikes.

Oscar Watch: Best Animated Feature

2010-02-02T22:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, so the blogosphere is probably alight with people yammering on about the Oscar noms from this morning, and while I certainly have my opinions (as my previous post makes no secret of), the fact is, I've hardly seen any of the movies up for the major awards this year. Some of it is due to a lack of enough interest, some is due to a lack of money, and some is due to a lack of time and/or availability (there's only one movie theater left where I live and their selection can be very skimpy when it comes to independent movies and certain subjects-- let's just say they didn't carry Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and likely will not carry A Single Man). To be fair, I still haven't seen any of the nominees for Best Picture from last year either, despite a Netflix subscription and two movie rental places at my disposal.

Getting back on topic, so while I can run around screaming that I want so-and-so to win such-and-such for whatever reason, the fact is, I've only seen Inglourious Basterds and Up for the Best Picture category, and Julie & Julia for the actresses and actors' awards. I feel a bit underqualified to be talking about these categories as a result. Instead, I'm going to be talking about my favorite category anyway, and the one from which I've seen the most nominees: the Best Animated Feature category.

First off, I have to eat my words from the other day: Up is indeed nominated for Best Picture. I am thrilled to see a second animated film make it to that category finally (the only other one was Beauty and the Beast in 1991), and I think it deserves to be there as much as anything else this year. So a big tip of my hat to the Academy for recognizing that it's not only a good animated movie but a good movie, period. Having said that, it won't win. I'm pretty sure Avatar's going to be taking that prize (why that isn't listed in the Animated Feature category is a little beyond me, but you can't win them all, I guess), and if it doesn't, one of the other live-action ones will. But it's okay, because it's also nominated for Best Animated Feature. (Has that ever happened before? I know the animation category is pretty new, and all, but I'm not sure I've seen even the Golden Globes double-book one movie for two different Best Feature awards like that.) So Up will win Best Animated feature, no real shocker there, and it is deserving. What's both frustrating and gratifying is that there are actually five movies in this category this year, and several of them are very good in their own right and I'd love to see them win, too. It's great to see more worthy contenders here at last, and there's even a diversity of media, too! In fact, I think for the first time ever, Up is the only CGI movie nominated, with two stop-motion films (Coraline and The Fantastic Mister Fox) and two traditional films (The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells), making for a nice display of the variety and diversity that animation can offer as a medium. I will say I'm surprised Miyazaki's Ponyo didn't make the cut. Seems like there could have been room for it somewhere in there.

While I know what movie will likely win, I'd still like to give my impressions of the other nominees, too, because I think they're very deserving of attention as well. Each one is unique and imaginative and skillfully made.

Up

Clearly the frontrunner to take this one, since Pixar nearly always wins and it's also up for Best Feature. It totally deserves every award, ticket sale, and word of praise it's received. It's a lighthearted adventure, a nostalgic story, a tearjerker, a comedy, and a buddy movie all at once, and yet it never feels constrained by any of those categories, either. It literally is all of them at the same time, never moving jerkily from one idea to the next, and it's all wrapped up in this warm-heartedness that permeates every aspect of it. It manages to convey a lifetime in ten minutes and have it mean something to the people watching it, so we understand Carl's attachment to things like a mailbox and a painted wooden bird. The lesson he learns is one that the audience learns with him, instead of watching from a superior vantage point, already knowing the answer and just waiting for him to get there. It's a lesson a lot of us have a hard time accepting, and maybe afterward still don't want to accept. It challenges us there without ever feeling like it's condescending to us. Someone remarked that it felt more like a Miyazaki movie than any other Pixar movie had managed to do so far, and I agree there. That envelopment in a sense of nostalgia and sentiment that never seem cloying, that ability to literally create a world from nothing that still feels like it has life in it, the gentleness and the heartfelt desire to really create something of quality and emotion and meaning is all there, as it is in every Miyazaki film I've seen. I may complain about Pixar winning this category every year, but it's only because I think they deserve either better competition here, or to be competing for Best Picture. They deserve it.

Coraline

I've blogged about this one before, but time hasn't lessened how much I like this movie. Henry Selick has a way of capturing an atmosphere and almost indefinable charm that I find lacking in a lot of other stop-motion (Wallace and Gromit being a big exception), and he really deserves a lot more recognition than he gets. Most people still think Tim Burton directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, and it gets tiresome correcting them all the time. Of course, I'm also partial to this movie because it's based on a book by Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors since I was sixteen. Some things were changed for the film (like the existence of a major supporting character), but it's part of the process of adaptation from one medium to another, and I thought it was very well-handled and done with a lot of respect to the source material. One of the most distinguishing aspects of Selick's design style that I'm very fond of is little physical irregularities, like a mouth being lopsided. It makes the characters more interesting to look at without being distracting, and it adds a quirky charm to everything that I really love. I also love that he wasn't afraid to keep it creepy. My favorite movies when I was a kid were the ones with creepy or even outright scary moments in them, like The Dark Crystal (which I think I've seen in English once, since the only friend of mine who had it in my childhood had it taped off TV from Costa Rica-- I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I loved it anyway), The Neverending Story, and Return to Oz, which also features some of my favorite pieces of claymation animation. (Honorable mention goes to The Adventures of Mark Twain-- even though I didn't see it until I was much older, parts of it unnerved the hell out of me and it probably would have fit right in on that list.) I was personally glad to see a return to the kids movie with some teeth, since it always gave me the impression as a kid that something really was at stake in these stories, and what these characters were doing mattered. It made the triumph at the end mean more because they had something very threateningly real to overcome. That's very much the case with this movie, and I have to give a lot of credit to Terri Hatcher for her performance as both Coraline's mother and the Other Mother-- such subtle things she did with her voice that gave the animators a lot of room to get the acting just right to hit that balance of honey-sweet overlaying something terrible. I also love that all the women in this movie have a witchiness about them-- real witch, not "w-to-rhyme-with-b" witch. There are so many subtle touches in it, and I'm a sucker for detail, and I felt it was a wonderful adaptation of an equally wonderful children's book. Growing up, this one would have been an absolute favorite for me, the adventure/coming of age story I'd always wanted without having to superimpose myself on a boy to get it.

The Fantastic Mr Fox

Okay, I have to admit, this is the only one in this category I haven't watched yet. I wasn't sure what to think of it judging from the one or two very short promos I ever saw for it, but I did hear from friends that it was a lot better than they'd been expecting, and was even downright good. It never came anywhere close to me, but it'll be on my Netflix queue as soon as it's available. On a side note, I really wish George Clooney would do more voicework, he's got what they call "a voice with character" in spades, and he has a great range of emotive capabilities to draw from. I think the medium would suit him nicely.

The Princess and the Frog
(Pretty long, since I never got around to writing an actual review for it before.)

Disney finally returns to the media that launched the mega-conglomerate in the first place. I could not believe the short-sighted stupidity at play when they closed down their traditional animation studios after 2004's Home on the Range. I was ecstatic when I heard they were (finally!) reopening them after the merger with Pixar and Lasseter finally brought a little common sense back to the creative decisions. (Really, assuming that tepid ticket sales on the traditional animation movies with the booming sales for Pixar movies meant that traditional animation was dead as an art form is asinine-- evidently no one paused to consider that it was the stories that were lackluster, not the medium itself.) The directors in charge for this movie were Ron Clements and John Musker, the directing team behind The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, and Treasure Planet, which I felt was a pretty wise choice, as well as a symbolic one, given that Mermaid kicked off Disney's '90s renaissance and saved it from going under. The end result was pretty fine, a return to the traditional fairy tale stories that the company is known for, with some really beautiful animation (almost show-off beautiful in places) and the sort of charming, plucky, independent heroine that Ron n' John love to showcase. Bonus feature that the prince was also charismatic, charming, and cocky (an actual personality, something lacking in Mermaid's prince-- or most of Disney's classics, for that matter), and they both felt like a lot of work had gone into their development as individual characters, not just their designs. You could tell that they really wanted to get this one right, and in a lot of ways they did. The beginning was wonderful, the villain was incredible, the animation was absolutely lovely (and in places spooky), and it featured Jim Cummings doing his wonderful Cajun accent, which I'd only heard once before in a direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie.

I loved that the heroine wanted a career, and I love that she didn't have to choose between it and her romance-- even if the romance part was incredibly rushed and sort of came out of nowhere and smacked me upside the head with its randomness 2/3 of the way through the movie. That really was the biggest beef I had with this one, was I did not buy the suddenness of the romance at all. It jerked me completely out of the movie and I found thoughts like "really? you've known her for a day!" to be very distracting for much of this part. I would have been totally fine if they'd implied more of a passing of time at the end, or if they hadn't set up such a constrained time limit for the action to take place in initially, or if there was some attempt to show that they had spent more than a day together before falling in love. But it was literally a day. And this wasn't one of the love at first sight relationships, either, it was one they were clearly supposed to grow into, so that just made it even more jarring.

The middle in general is a problem, since it seems to dissolve into random comedic relief elements for the sake of waking the kids up and filling space until the end. There's also a character here who seems to serve no real point to the story whatsoever (aside from padding things out and giving the leads something to do for the middle part) and while I get that she was supposed to be the representation of the "proper" form of voodoo in contrast to the villain's misuse of it for personal gain, I felt like giving her a gospel song and lots of Christian church imagery sort of undermined that idea. Oh, and there are some issues with astronomy at one or two points (the Evening Star is the planet Venus, not an actual star, for instance, and there's something that happens later on that sort of made my head explode a little) but it wasn't anything so major that I lost any sleep over it.

It does come back together at the end again, and there's a really wonderful dynamic between Tiana and the female supporting character whose name I have forgotten (but who may have been my favorite character next to the villain just because she was hilarious), as well as the prince, once we get past that really awkward phase in the middle and I was able to pretend they'd had more time to get to know each other. And yeah, there are subtle mentions of racism, and a contrast drawn between the means Tiana's family lives in and the means her friend, the rich, white debutante lives in. It's subtle enough to keep any nagging feelings of guilt at bay, and some things may be unrealistic for the time frame this is set in, but it doesn't try to sweep these problems under the rug, either. So, in summary, yeah, the movie has some flaws, but honestly, they didn't keep me from enjoying myself a great deal, and overall I was pretty pleased with it as a return to good ol' hand-drawn animation. It's probably the most flawed of the films in this category, but I think it does still deserve to be in here, and it's worth seeing.

The Secret of Kells

I'm probably one of the very few people on this side of the Atlantic to have been able to see this one yet, and I was both very surprised and very happy to see it nominated. First-off, it's really, really beautiful. Astonishingly beautiful. Very reminiscent of a little-known masterpiece of traditional animation called The Thief and the Cobbler, by animation legend Richard Williams. It's done in that same 2 1/2-dimension style that's reminiscent of medieval art, and it draws inspiration from the Book of Kells and traditional Celtic artwork as well. There's a mix of magic and faeries and the old nature-worshipping religions of the British Isles and the Christian religion that was trying to stake its claim there as well. I never felt like it was disrespectful of either one and seemed to be leaning more towards the idea of mutual cohabitation and respect, which I always appreciate. There are definitely ideas under the surface here, and it never felt like it was pandering exclusively to a young crowd, nor did it feel like it was trying to exclude them. There are also interesting changes in perspective, between the way a young Brendan sees the events happening around him, and the way the adults do, and there's a wonderful sense of trust on the part of the filmmakers to allow audience members of all ages to consider both without pandering to either. There are some tense moments, and a few that I was really shocked to see in a film with such a fun and colorful design. There are more of those creepy/scary moments towards the end that I would have been afraid of but secretly loved as a kid, and again, it serves to add some real weight to the story and create a sense that something important is at stake. It's a stunningly beautiful film that probes some ideas that most kids movies don't like to, and there is a surprising intensity to some of the later scenes that not all kids are going to be comfortable with. But I like that the filmmakers took some risks, and I'm really happy to see it get recognized. I hope that means we get a DVD release soon.

Well, that's it for that category. I have to say, I'm really pleased with the diversity and quality of the selections this year, and I really, really hope it's a trend that continues.

Why Am I Suddenly Excited About the Oscars This Year?

2010-02-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

I don't really get that into the Oscars. They tend to be awarded based on which nominee attends the right parties and schmoozes the right way, or which idea/cause is most popular at the time, rather than which one is truly the most deserving. I have to say, it is rare to find a nominee that's undeserving of recognition or praise, but the actual winners do tend to be based around political (and by this I mean Hollywood politics, not politics-politics) decisions instead of technical merits. So I don't tend to pay attention much unless a movie I particularly like is up for something major.

But that isn't to say they don't matter. To the average moviegoer, they don't really, people will see what they want to see regardless of awards. But to the people making films in Hollywood they do matter because not only does it bring them recognition and a certain status amongst viewers, but it opens doors to projects they might not be considered for otherwise. An Oscar win to executives can mean a certain bankability because suddenly people know who this person is and are more likely to be interested in a film from a familiar name. To the winner, it means a certain level of prestige, but more than that, it means being taken seriously. Of course, it adds pressure, because then they have to deliver something on par with something that successful or they risk being labeled a fluke, or even worse a hack with a lucky win. But you still get your name and your movie branded with the Oscar-Winner seal forever, and that's more than most people get.

But given that that's pretty much a constant, why do I actually care this year when I don't most of the time? No, it's not because Up might be be nominated for Best Picture (razzaflabbin' Best Animated Feature category... I learned my lesson after Ratatouille and Persepolis got their conciliatory nominations there in '07 instead of being able to contend for the "more serious" category-- and really, it does get a little boring when Pixar wins it every freaking year; not that they don't deserve to win it, but geez, they may as well just start calling it the Pixar Award), it's because a woman is going to be nominated for Best Director for only the fourth time ever. And she has a serious shot at being the first one to win it.

Out of 82 years and approximately 410 Best Director nominations, Katheryn Bigelow will be the fourth woman nominee, behind Lina Wertmuller in 1976, Jane Campion in 1993, and Sofia Coppola in 2003 (none of whom won, I might add). This weekend, she won the Director's Guild of America award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film, and the DGA is an almost flawless match with the Academy Award for Best Director (according to what I've been reading, there have only been six deviations from DGA winners and Oscar winners). She is the first woman to win that award, too, and now she's the front-runner for the Oscar.

Now, to be fair, I haven't seen her film, The Hurt Locker yet. I hear it's very good, and I've been seeing snippets about critics lauding her very highly for her work, and her topping many of their lists for best director of the year. I haven't heard anyone saying that she's only getting attention because she's a woman, or that she didn't deserve to win the DGA just as much as anyone else that was up for it. In fact the only reservations about this I hear are from a few people who wish the film that got the possible first woman winner nominated was a "woman's" film instead of a "guy's" film (The Hurt Locker is about soldiers in the Iraq War-- an action/suspense movie). While I understand that sentiment and agree with it to a certain extent, 2009 was a phenomenal year for women-fueled movies, with Julie & Julia at $94.1 million, It's Complicated at $100 million, The Proposal at $164 million, The Blind Side at $235 million, and New Moon at $293 million, and all of them hitting in the last half of the year. Say what you will about any of them as films, the fact is, they were geared for women, starred women (two of them starring the same woman, who is over forty to boot), and three of them were even directed by women. New Moon's numbers were something like 90% female viewers (note: not fact-checked, am basing this on memory which is often faulty with numbers), making that even more astounding (most Hollywood blockbusters are split around 60% male and 40% female audiences, so even with "guy" films, women make up a significant portion of ticket sales). Normally a movie like that making that kind of money will be chalked up to a fluke by studio execs, who from what I've been given to understand by people in the know, like Nia Vardalos (writer and star of My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding) writing an article stating that during a movie pitch she was asked to switch the female lead to a man because "women don't go to movies", and based on the levels of contempt, vitriol, and venom that arose when NPR's Linda Holmes posted an open letter to Pixar asking why they hadn't yet made a film starring a female lead (which I blogged about early on here). This year, of all years, is the one that is making people notice because women are proving the execs wrong and proving that they do go to movies.

So I don't care if Bigelow directed an action thriller and that's considered a "guy" movie because there is plenty of proof that female-driven, made, and geared films are profitable and desired by women who want to see themselves reflected on the screen as much as the guys do. Bigelow did the job, she directed a really good movie from all accounts, and she deserves the award as much as anyone else up there. So yeah, I want her to win it. I want her to win it bad because it's one less glass ceiling in the world, because it's 2010 and women make up 51% of the population and it's about time, because I want that message to resonate with all those girls out there who might have talked themselves out of a directing career because it's so hard to be successful, because I want it to resonate with the studio execs, because I want it to resonate with everyone who considers the efforts, ambitions, dreams, thoughts, feelings, and lives of women as less important or meaningful than that of men, and I want it for me. I'm headed to film school in a few short years and yeah, I'd like to direct someday, and I'd for damn sure like to be taken seriously enough to be given the chance to succeed or fail at it on my own merits, not on the basis of my gender. An Oscar win won't magically make that happen, but it's a step forward, and that's what I care about.

"The Namesake"

2010-01-29T22:24:00.000-08:00

I've never seen a film from director Mira Nair all the way through before, but if they're anything like this one, I'll add them to the list. There's a warmth and a tenderness to this movie that permeated every frame, and it captures the feeling of being slightly out of step with the world surrounding you. In that respect, it's similar to Persepolis, which I reviewed last year, and I suspect it's a very familiar story to immigrants and ex-patriots living anywhere in the world. Not only the first-generation immigrants, but the struggle of their children, often caught with one foot in one culture and one foot in another, frustrated that they are part of both and yet not wholly belonging to one. It's also a very skillful portrayal of two generations of a family, exploring the course of their lives in such a way that both are sympathetic even in their different perspectives. One of the people I viewed it with compared it to Zhang Yimou's To Live, and I think it's a fair comparison; though the family there didn't deal with relocating to a totally foreign culture, the film did explore the course of their lives during the major upheavals going on in China in the mid-twentieth century. It's in the exploration of the human characters that the films both plant themselves and through which the audience is allowed to explore something that they might never experience personally, but is still mostly universally understood.

The trailer for this movie is rather misleading. I saw it sometime last year and was expecting something very different, and I'm honestly glad for that. I love it when I can watch a movie and not be able to predict where it's going. There were instances where I did, and there were cinematic tip-offs about them, but they're pretty minor and they didn't detract from the experience of watching it. But really, overall, I think my biggest pet peeve about the film is its trailer (which isn't the film's fault, but the marketing department).

The impression I had was of a young interracial couple embarking on a journey to India to connect with the man's heritage and in the process discover things about his parents' lives from before he was born. That is not what the movie's about at all. It's much less trite and contrived than that, it's a much more personal story, and it doesn't indulge in the surface-level exotifying of the culture that the trailer seems like it might. At its core, it's about a family living their lives, stuck between two cultures, and in particular about the eldest son coming to terms with his identity as part of both. I think that Gogol (Kal Penn) is a central character, certainly, but I don't think he's the very center of the film. I felt like the parents, Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) were both equally as important and equally weighted. We see their lives first, get to know them a bit before they know each other, and then watch them grow into a loving couple, and then into loving parents. We understand the choices they make, we understand them as people first, and we never lose that insight even as the focus switches to their children. I found myself able to empathize, sympathize, and understand where both the parents and the kids were coming from, even as they clashed, and it was a wonderful thing to be able to see. The kind of perspective the film offers is one I appreciate more as I get older and marvel at how narrow and self-centered my focus was when I was a teenager and young adult. I think part of me is grateful when I see that in films because it reassures me that I wasn't the only one going through the same thing.

There are so many wonderful things to say about this film. I love that it doesn't vilify either culture-- Ashoke and Ashima come to America for opportunities for their kids, not because they're fleeing some terrible injustice in India; their son Gogol's WASPish college girlfriend is a nice, intelligent person with loving parents who cares for him, but just doesn't understand his family's culture enough to be there for him in the way he needs; his wife later wasn't a bad person, she just wanted something different than he did and they weren't a good match; Ashima's feelings of isolation aren't because of specific cruelty or insensitivity of Americans, but because she doesn't feel completely at home in the culture and misses India; Gogol's high school classmates tease him about his name, but he does have friends who stand up for him as well. There's no "bad guy" here, just the gentle friction of people trying to find their place in a society that isn't quite made for them, and their own ways of dealing with it. It's a very thoughtful movie, a carefully and even lovingly crafted movie with particularly warm and nuanced performances by Khan and Tabu, and absolutely beautifully shot. Penn does a fine job with his role, and it's a nice dramatic turn for him after the success of the Harold and Kumar movies, but it's Khan and Tabu whose performances shine here and drive the heartbeat of the film.

It's based on a novel with the same title by Jhumpa Lahiri, and I'll most likely end up reading it just to be able to spend more time with the characters. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in Indian culture, or in beautiful film, or to anyone who has ever been part of a family.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Webcomics

2010-01-11T20:42:00.000-08:00

Okay that wasn't even remotely clever, but I have a deficit of talent for naming things.

So probably no one who reads this knows that one of the first webcomics I ever read regularly, Dar!, ended recently. Not in a sad way, the author was just ready to move on, which is the proper time to end things as far as I'm concerned. But it got me to thinking about how many comics I used to buy and read every week from my local comic book store, how I haven't read any of them in years, and how many webcomics I still read and enjoy. So, in light of the fact that I should probably be doing something else with my time tonight, I'm going to give a brief rundown of my favorite online comics.

Dar! , by Erika Moen. Erika and I have been vaguely aware of each other online for probably close to a decade now, I think, which is probably why I've been as aware of her comic as I have been for so long. It's just an autobiographical comic about her everyday life, starting with her as a sophomore in college and ending with her life as of December 2009. It's pretty frank most of the time, which I admire, since a lot of people feel the need to 'pretty' themselves up for autobiographical work, but Erika seems to revel in her warts. It's often NSFW (that's Not Safe For Work, in case anyone doesn't know), and spends some time traveling down some dark corners as Erika goes through the upheavals of depression, wrestling with her sexual identity, finding love, breaking up, graduating, working, finding love again, wrestling with her sexual identity again, and the general ordeals of life. That makes it sound less funny than it was, and it was funny. Most of the NSFW content comes from the humor, with loads of "dick and fart jokes", as Erika puts it. And yet, it's even more interesting because she's so candid about her sex life and her bodily functions. It never felt like she was trying to shove it in anyone's face to make herself feel edgy, it's just how she shared what she found interesting or entertaining from her life.

Girl Genius written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, and drawn by Phil Foglio. I was aware of Phil Foglio's art long before I knew about this strip, since I spent a great deal of my adolescence reading Robert Asprin's "Myth" book series, some of which he illustrated. His style is very distinct and it might take some people-- more used to regular comics or manga-- a little while to adjust to it, but I think it's well worth the time investing in it. The series has been running for a number of years now, so there's a lot of story to catch up on, but it tends to go pretty fast once you get started. It's a gaslamp adventure series centering on a young woman named Agatha with a mysterious locket that gets stolen early on in the story. This seems to be a very bad thing, not because it held precious memories for her or was of particular monetary value, but because it seems that there is something inside Agatha that the locket repressed that may or may not be good to unleash. As the webpage touts, it's full of action, adventure, romance, and mad science, and it is chock full of all of them. But in a good way. It's a really fun series if you like gaslamp, or slowly unraveling mysteries, or fun inventions, some irreverent humor, large casts of characters, complex political schemes, and some good, old-fashioned Victorian melodrama. It's a lot of fun to watch Agatha go from a timid, unsure young woman into a strong, confident, take-charge young woman over the course of the story. And I love seeing the almost fugue states of creativity the Sparks (geniuses) in the story go into when they're really getting into their work. I've had days where I can relate to that feeling. (This also just won a Hugo award the the last year, which is pretty cool.)

Platinum Grit, written by Danny Murphy and Trudy Cooper, drawn by Trudy Cooper. It's hard to describe what this comic is about beyond the characters. There is a plot in the form of a slowly unraveling supernatural mystery involving a Scottish castle (relocated to Australia-- I think. it might be in Scotland) and some sort of family curse. The one whose family is cursed is one Jeremy MacConner, a talented physicist who's hopeless at talking to girls or having many friends. His cousin, Dugan, seems to be an homage to the Highlander series, as he's immortal, violent, and rather a bit of a prick towards poor Jeremy. Early on he and Jeremy duel for inheritance of the family castle, and has since randomly popped up in Jeremy's nightmares, but nothing else so far. Aside from nearly being killed by homicidal family members, Jeremy spends his time being abducted by aliens, being abused by his friend Nils, reading books on physics, being comatose, being assaulted by supernatural forces, and generally trying to stay alive. He also likes playing with his pet pig, Arthur.

Jeremy's friend Nils is the second in the trio of main characters, and she seems to spend most of her time either teasing him mercilessly (abusing him emotionally, more like), having one-night stands with random guys she meets out, being rather wacky and outrageous, and sometimes extremely drunk. Of course Jeremy has a crush on her, despite all the abuse she heaps on him, because she's just the sort of girl who can get away with doing that and he's the sort of guy who'll take it. She doesn't seem to be phased by any of the weird things that happen in Jeremy's life, she just takes them in stride and tends to get violent and weird right back at them.

Enter Kate. I'll be honest, I didn't really get into the story until she showed up in the sixth book. Of anyone in the story, she's the one I identify with most, and the anchor of sense and reason in a group of loopy characters and unusual happenings. Kate's a journalist, cynical, chainsmoking, sarcastic, witty, and a former roommate of Nils's. She picks Jeremy up on a roadtrip (he was left naked on the side of the road by Nils) and in the process gets dragged into his crazy world. She seems to have developed a bit of a thing for Jeremy and hates the way Nils treats him, though her issues with her go back much further than that, as the two have a prickly relationship from the get-go. She doesn't deal well with the weirdness and tries to ignore or rationalize it at first, which leads to several tantrums and a lot of tension on her part, but she keeps coming back to it because she just can't walk away.

It's fun to watch Cooper's art style evolve over the years and I have to say, she's really fantastic with not only drawing what's happening, but in setting a mood and pacing a story just right. Her 'acting' with the characters is great and they each have their own, very distinct personalities visually. And the mystery of what's happening with Jeremy's family is even more compelling because of the mortal peril he finds himself in so often. No one knows why it's happening or how to stop it, and neither do we, but we're so engaged with the characters that we really want the guy to be okay. Plus it's funny.

The Order of the Stick, by Rich Burlew. I haven't done a lot of tabletop gaming, just one stint several years ago as an attempt at bonding with friend who did it. I thought it was fun, for the most part, though I don't pine for it. But even without that brief exposure, I'd probably still find this comic funny. It's another long-running webcomic, but the art itself doesn't really evolve, since the characters have all had the exact same design since the first strip, save for their clothes. But it's interesting to see how the storyline and characters' personalities have evolved from being pretty simple into increasingly complex without becoming overly so. It's a spoof of/homage to tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, and it's less like the characters are occasionally self-aware (making references to saving throws and hitpoints) so much as they are the creations of someone playing the game and getting wrapped up in their character but still being aware that they're rolling the dice to see what happens. Or maybe the characters are self-aware, I'm not entirely sure, but it's beside the point. It makes me laugh, it's a fun adventure, and I love all the characters.

Shrub Monkeys, by Katie Shanahan. Sort of like Dar!, this is a (mostly) autobiographical comic, but it's primarily silly humor. Katie, or K.T., as she refers to herself, is an animator in Toronto and creates these strips with the aid of her younger brother "Shagster" and sister Hes. It's mostly humorous strips about KT's struggle with school and later work, hanging out with her siblings, roommate, or boyfriend, and basic, everyday life. Just punched up a bit with exaggeration, extremely silly faces, and a slightly warped sense of humor. She's another one whose work has steadily evolved over the years, and her background in animation is clearly beneficial to her layouts. Fun stuff in this one, I love seeing when she's posted a new one.

Hark, a Vagrant, by Kate Beaton. I'm fairly new to this, but I love odd, dry humor, and this has it in spades. I also love irony and satire. I need to start reading it more regularly.

I think that's about it, off the top of my head. Anyone else out there have webcomics to recommend? I'm always looking for ways to procrastinate.

IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Common Sense"

2010-01-09T12:37:00.001-08:00

(I wrote a big mash-up of my thoughts after seeing Sherlock Holmes last weekend, but I realized as I was finishing it up that I didn't want to post it anymore. So now you get the lazy post.)

From Dictionary.com:

"--noun
sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence."

So this would be things like 'if you put your hand on a hot stove, it'll get burned' or 'don't run with scissors'. It implies a comprehension of cause and effect based on life experience. A normal adult would be expected to know these things, however children are often (repeatedly) told not to do them because they haven't fully grasped the idea of "effect" yet. These examples of common sense are ones that hopefully become adopted as children grow older and gain things like empathy and the ability to anticipate. 'Cause nobody wants to have to tell their 40-year-old brother to quit jumping on their new couch in his muddy hiking cleats.

There is another meaning to the term that most online dictionaries don't have (and it therefore falls into the arena of this blog-- popular culture), and it involves truth in contrast to commonly held beliefs. If you break down the term, "common" implies something that is widespread, ordinary, or shared by a group of people, and "sense". In other words, it's often used to describe an idea that is commonly held to be true amongst a certain group of people, regardless of the actual truth or validity of it. For example, the prevalence of what's called "scientific racism" in the United States prior to World War II-- the use of so-called scientific theory to explain why certain races were intrinsically superior to others and therefore deserved dominance over them.
Here's an old illustration from Harper's Weekly "demonstrating" the supposed similarities between the Irish and the African races, and their contrast with the Anglo race. The caption is difficult to read, but the basic gist of it is that the Irish were descended from African people who had migrated up to Europe through Spain and eventually arrived in Ireland where they bred with indigenous people there-- who were "low types", descended from the "savages from the Stone Age"-- and were subsequently isolated from the rest of the world, no longer part of the process of natural selection, and therefore inherently inferior to the anglo race from the rest of Europe. It seriously says "made way for superior races" in the last line.

Now, clearly this has no bearing whatsoever in scientific fact (I love that the author evidently believes that there are races that didn't descend from the stone ages), and is an excuse to justify the "common sense" that Africans and the Irish were naturally inferior beings to white Europeans (who weren't Irish). Implicit in this is the "common sense" that Africans are inferior-- that didn't even need to be explained in the text, the author assuming the readers would already understand that as a fact. I have seen other illustrations that supposedly demonstrate how much closer Africans are to apes than other races are, but it's the same basic concept as this one focusing on the Irish. It's the presentation of speculation in an attempt to justify a personal belief based in the common sense of the time (that darker races were naturally inferior to lighter and non-Irish ones) with little to no basis in scientific evidence. (In fact, many scientists today believe that race is a social construct, not a scientifically quantifiable category.)

So to summarize, common sense can be a good, useful thing (don't try to talk while drinking a glass of water), but it can also stand in the way of critical thinking. If people in the past had adhered strictly to common sense ideas, those us us living today wouldn't know about plate tectonics, the age of the Earth, evolution, psychology, chemistry, physics, and countless other advances in our understanding of nature.

Post-Holiday Post

2010-01-01T15:06:00.000-08:00

Well, another year and another decade have come and gone. I thought about trying to come up with some sort of nostalgic look back across one of them before 2010 came, but there were so many other blogs out there that said all I'd have to say and more. I don't have a good grasp of my walk through this decade anyway, it's like trying to remember every move you made in the middle of a drunken, off-the-cuff dance-- you know you were doing things, and maybe a few of them stand out, but in retrospect it was just this chaotic mess that somehow got you to where you are now. The best you can do is look back at it and be amazed at how far you managed to come.

So many people have done great retrospectives (check some of those links at the right hand of the page for a few), that I feel I don't have anything to add to them. So instead, on the first day of the new year, I'm going to look ahead to what I'm looking forward to. I have no idea what's coming down the pipe for me this year, but I do have expectations in a general sense.

1) Things will change. Change is constant and inevitable, and much as I dislike it at times, I don't think it's a good or bad thing in and of itself. It is what it is, and I'm the one who makes meaning out of it. The best way to get through it is not to fight it, but adapt to it.

2) I will be exposed to new ideas. These ideas are likely not new in the general sense so much as they are new to me. Or maybe they will be very old ideas that I've forgotten, or will see in a new way. Some I will like, some I will not. But they're all a valuable part in my learning to grow beyond the state I'm in now.

3) I will look back on the ideas I had and the things I've said now with a slight sense of embarrassment. At least I hope I will. If I've got everything figured out now, I've got some very boring decades ahead of me. I just hope I remember that even then, I won't have it all figured out either, and I hope that I'll have learned to be a little kinder to my younger self than I am now.

4) I will watch a lot of movies. Hopefully I will like some of them. I really hope that I love at least a few of them.

5) I hope that I will continue to meet people who challenge me, who inspire me, and who connect with me in some way. I also hope I can hang on to the people who put up with my quirks, my ego, and my insecurities. I feel like I'm in a very different place than I ever have been in my life, and in some ways it's exhilarating, and in other ways it's lonely.

And so this post has some relevance to the topic of this blog (and I feel less like a sappy blowhard), here are some trailers for movies I'm looking forward to, for various reasons.

The Wolfman

Alice in Wonderland

And just for the sake of perspective, here are trailers for some of my favorite movies from the past year.

Inglourious Basterds

Up

Where the Wild Things Are

Some of those trailers are better at describing the movie than others, but still. That's a mighty fine lineup for one year.

Spotlight On: Satoshi Kon

2009-12-09T11:48:00.000-08:00

(To view a preview for each film, click the title.)

Upon learning I'm a film student, often first question I'm asked is, "who's your favorite director?" Very often I don't have an answer-- I've never been one to have an absolute favorite anything-- however one name that does leap to mind with pretty solid consistency is Satoshi Kon. Even though he only has four films and one television show to his directing credit, they are all of such high quality and unusual content that every one of them would be worth discussing in detail. (I should note that I haven't seen the television series, Paranoia Agent yet, though I plan to soon.) While there are certain unifying themes in his works, they are all distinctly different in tone and genre, which only adds to Kon's skills as a director-- instead of staying with the genre that he first found success with, he tries something new each time, which adds a new dimension to the credibility of his range and vision.

It Really Is a Medium

Probably my favorite aspect of his body of work is that he uses animation as a medium instead of a genre. Many people automatically associate animation with a genre, such as children's films, or fantasy, and this is especially so in the US. To the best of my knowledge, this idea is not as firmly rooted in Europe, where many countries have their own rich animation legacies and France in particular produces films like The Triplets of Belleville and Persepolis to great worldwide acclaim. Recently the Israeli film Waltz With Bashir also used the medium to effectively tackle adult subject matter in a highly effective way, and there seems to be a dawning realization that animation is capable of much more than most people ever considered.

Asian countries, in particular Japan, have not traditionally been as wedded to the idea that animation is a medium strictly for children and have produced a staggering amount of television, video and DVD releases, and feature films with it. There are more variations on genre in these instances, though there is an emphasis on children and teenaged-audiences, and more of the popular titles tend to fall into the fantasy or science fiction categories, so it's not all that different in that respect. Even a legendary director like Hayao Miyazaki stays to these genres, though his mastery of the medium and talent for storytelling elevate his films above traditional "anime" in the minds of most.

So where does Satoshi Kon fit into all this? While Miyazaki produces epic fantasies for all ages, full of messages about self-esteem, environmentalism, war, work ethic, and devotion, Kon produces quiet, more introspective, psychologically ambiguous works that deal with the blurring of reality and fantasy, and the nature of the media in modern culture and its impact on the human mind. Both men craft films of staggering detail, emotion, and artistry, but where Miyazaki brings realistic detail to the fantastic, Kon very subtly weaves the fantastic into reality.

Films

My first exposure to him was the film Perfect Blue, his directorial debut. I was fairly new to my appreciation of Japanese animation (I'd held it in universal disdain for quite a number of years until my very early twenties), and to say that this film disturbed me is something of an understatement. While very skillfully made, and scenes from it have haunted me in the years since, it's only recently that I've managed to bring myself to watch it again. The story revolves around a young pop idol from a dime-a-dozen pop music group try to branch out into a successful acting career. She finds that in order to gain the kind of exposure she needs to garner serious attention is to cast off her innocent, wholesome pop singer image and pose nude for photo shoots and partake in a graphic rape scene for a TV show. As this happens, she finds herself stalked by a fan from her pop idol days, and discovers an internet page claiming to be written by her with intimate details of her life on display. She begins to see hallucinations or possibly dreams of her pop-idol self chastising her for the choices she's made for the sake of her ambition, and eventually people around her start dying. Both Mima's and the audience's sense of what is reality disintegrates through the course of the film, and until the end, neither she nor we are entirely sure if those fantasies of her murdering the people exploiting her are really fantasies or not.

I'd heard about Millennium Actress, Kon's next film, probably a year or two after I saw Perfect Blue. I didn't wind up seeing it until two years ago, convinced it was another violent psychological thriller, and no matter how well-made it might be, I simply didn't feel up to coping with another one from him. This impression could not have been more wrong. Actress is the flipside of the situation in Blue, where the connection between a star and her biggest fan is touching and impacts their lives in positive ways. It's a sweet, heartfelt film that captures the essence of Japanese history and film from World War II through to the twenty-first century in the life and career of one legendary actress.

It's a love story between her and a mysterious figure she met only briefly in her early teens, but whom she spent her life chasing after, as well as that of a man so inspired by her image, he spent his career chasing it. Chiyoko begins her career as an excuse to chase after the man she helps rescue one snowy winter morning, traveling all the way to Manchuria to film a propaganda picture during WWII-- he left a key near her house as he fled the Japanese secret police and she vowed to bring it to him. Her movie career blossoms and her roles take her as far back as 1,000 years in Japanese history even as her own life keeps progressing forward through adulthood, middle-age, and even old age. Whether the roles she had eerily match the events from her life or her memories have become so intertwined with them that they're inseparable, it's never clear, but neither is it that important to figure out. The snippets she recalls from her films continue to drive forward the story of her own personal quest for the man she's compelled to find just as easily as a literal enactment would have been, and it creates a fascinating and entertaining vehicle to contemplate the depths to which films can become a part of our lives.

Tachibana, a longtime fan, seeks her out for a documentary of her career years after she retires in seclusion. He's worked in films and even managed to create his own production company ("Lotus", named for her favorite flower), spurred by his fascination and admiration of her. Though often played for comedy, he and his assistant further the blurring of reality, memory, and fantasy by becoming involved in her flashbacks, even able to directly affect them and bring back mementos when the scene shifts back to the present. To attempt to understand what's literally happening here is futile and misses the point: the film is demonstrating how involved the audience becomes with the films it views, how potent the fantasy is, and how much it becomes a part of the culture and collective memory of those who view it. It isn't science fiction or fantasy, it's a visual, stylistic method of conveying a complex idea while at the same time, driving forward the story without breaking our concentration.

There's even more to talk about with this film, but it's best left for debate amongst people who have seen it. Suffice to say, I was so surprised and moved by this film, it completely overshadowed my fear of and anxiety towards Kon's work and I rushed to watch his next film.

Tokyo Godfathers is yet another departure from his previous films. While Blue is a thriller and Actress is a love story, Godfathers is a slapstick comedy with a very unusual subject: the homeless. The three protagonists of the film are a sort of dysfunctional family of homeless people: Gin, the "father" figure, a former family man who's haunted by his past; Hana, the "mother" figure in the form of a homosexual transvestite who longs for family, and Miyuki, the "daughter", a sixteen year-old runaway hiding from her father. While dumpster diving for presents on Christmas Eve, they come across an abandoned baby and set out to find its mother. Of course, through the journey they each wind up confronting their pasts, usually through a series of miraculous coincidences, each one becoming more implausible than the last.

Kon's go-to animation studio Mad House retains its hyper-realistic style that they used for his previous two films, but couples it with more exaggeration and "cartoonish" facial expressions to heighten the goofy comedy. However, the film also doesn't shy away from the more realistic and serious hardships that come with living on the streets, as well as the characters' backstories, and there is very much a solid, emotionally resonant core beneath all the humor. The blurring of reality and fantasy inside the story isn't as pronounced as in Kon's other works, though it does crop up occasionally. Personally, I see it happening most often with the coincidences, almost like an accentuated version of the type of thing that happens in a lot of Hollywood films, where destiny drives the characters to their inevitable resolutions and happy endings.

It's no coincidence that the story takes place in the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the time of year when people are most likely to believe in miracles, and also when family connections feel culturally most important. The human connections in the film are what drive it, be they between the protagonists, their real families, or the people they meet along their journey-- every one of them is significant and unlikely, reminding us that no matter how high or low we may go on the social ladder, we are all still connected. Kon goes out of his way to shine a light on society's most forgotten and ignored, from the homeless to drag queens to Brazillian migrant workers, it's a side of Tokyo that doesn't get focused on much, and the fact that he does so in such an approachable and inalienating way is impressive. It's a feel-good movie, but one without as many empty calories as many of its brethren, and it's far more likely to get me in the holiday spirit than most.

Once again, Paprika is a departure from Kon's already eclectic body of work, this time delving into a more conventional arena for Japanese animation, science fiction. The character design also changes, Paprika being the only example that is recognizably Kon's style, with everyone else looking closer to the style used in Miyazaki's Spirited Away (coincidentally, also a style change for the director, and yes, I know the same character designer worked on both, but he also worked on Kon and Miyazaki's other works in their signature styles).

This is by far the most blatant example of the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, and if Actress works to gently twine the two together until one doesn't notice the difference, then this film has them crash together violently in a noisy cacophony of images that go by almost too fast to catch. Also like his previous films, it dialogues with Hollywood film, in ways more blatant and also more subtle than before: one of the characters has a reoccurring dream with scenes from various Hollywood films like Roman Holiday, and at one point has a conversation with someone about different film techniques as the camera demonstrates each one as he explains it; the film itself takes the Hollywood idea of the "destined pair" and turns it on its ear, while underhandedly critiquing its perpetuation of male sexual entitlement at the same time. It deliberately defies audience expectation by playing on these very commonly used techniques, which a lot of people found dissatisfying but which was frankly my favorite part of the entire film.

Like with Perfect Blue, Kon incorporates the internet into the list of media being used, this time as its own immersive world with very fuzzy boundaries to reality. Like Tokyo Godfathers it focuses on the interconnectedness of humans, this time through the idea of collective dreams. These ties don't seem to be accidental, as in the final scene, a character goes to a movie theater displaying movie posters for all of them-- instead of keeping them in the background, the camera pans slowly over all of them in chronological order, stopping on the poster for Kon's upcoming film, The Dreaming Machine. In a lot of ways, this film is very consciously telling the audience that they're watching a movie (outside of the fact that it's rendered in animation), and now that some images from Dreaming Machine have been released, it's much easier to see the scores of visual references littered throughout Paprika. So not only does this film dialogue with Hollywood and its influences and conventions, but with Kon's own body of work, past and future alike.

"Why wasn't this live action?"

One of the more interesting questions asked about Kon's works, and one which has many relevant answers. Perfect Blue started out as a live action film but ran into budget problems and delays, so animation was turned to as the next best option. Kon and Mad House's skill at creating detailed, realistic-feeling worlds served this story well, since the medium allowed them to seamlessly bend the laws of physics to allow a hallucination to skip effortlessly down a row of lamp posts, or appear in the reflection of a pane of glass-- instead of special effects that on some level impress upon the audience that the frames they're watching were altered, it's simply a part of the narrative, as seamlessly interwoven into the frame as the characters themselves. Despite its glaringly obvious lack of reality, it's also able to create higher tension in the audience because there is no real-life actor on screen, and the physical punishments that happen in a sense "really" happen to the character; in other words, there's no effects person gluing prosthetic wounds on before the scene is shot, no rubber knives, no trick shots, no digital effects added in later-- an animated character gets stabbed, they're stabbed with as real a weapon and have as real a wound as they themselves are. Of course there is also the impact of taking a medium that is generally thought of as being for children and telling very adult stories with it, which for many people is a profound one. If the recent trend of adult-oriented animation continues, this will likely lessen as people become accustomed to the idea.

The fact that Kon chooses to animate stories that for the most part could just as easily be filmed in live action is significant because it demonstrates the range it's capable of as a medium and the different psychological effect it can have on an audience. He was the first director I know of to really stretch the boundaries of what had been done with it up until then, particularly by utilizing its particular strengths in such subtle ways and to the best of my knowledge he's the only one still using this particular method. He's experimental and full of ideas and things to say, which is always exciting for me as a viewer, and I hope he continues to gain more exposure. The Dreaming Machine, his next film, is yet another departure for him into a more conventional animation standard, the children's film. I can't wait to see what he does with it.

"New Moon" Weekend

2009-11-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post right now about the giant juggernaut that is the Twilight franchise releasing its latest film this weekend. I probably won't see it, as I have little interest in the story on its own, but I just wanted to comment because it is huge, and it's striking to me that it's the first film in recent memory that is aimed specifically at women that is pretty much guaranteed to be a mega-hit at the box office.

I'm sort of ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it's about time that women and female-centric films were seriously considered as viable in Hollywood again, because they haven't been for a long time. There's this sense that women just don't go to the movies the same way men do (gee, I wonder if it might be because most big films released aren't aimed at women or even female-friendly most of the time), and it's about time that that idea got a serious rattling. On the other hand, I have some serious ideological problems with the stories in this series, and find them to be deeply problematic in some ways, so their continuing success and validation are troubling for me. The fact that it is so widely popular might mean that if Hollywood does decide to put more stock in projects aimed at women, they're going to be following this formula. So it's a bit of a double-edged blade.

That was really all I had to say on the subject. I'll have more posts this weekend, I hope, since I have tons of ideas right now.

IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Sinister"

2009-11-02T18:09:00.000-08:00

I know, I'm really slacking off in here. I meant to post a lot of things, and still intend to, but personal life events are severely restricting my time right now. As soon as they ease off a little, expect a cavalcade of posting from me.

Sinister

Sure, most people know what the word means now; "bad", "evil", "threatening", etc. But originally, waaaay back in the day, it actually referred to the left, or the left side of something. If a person was left-handed, they were "sinister". It's interesting to consider why the word has evolved into its current meaning, especially in light of what's happened to its opposite, "dexterous", meaning skillful, or clever (or right-handed). Its root, "dexter" has dropped out of usage, but it also meant "favorable" as well as 'on the right-hand side'. Interesting to see how we assign meaning in such ways, and how these two terms have become even more removed from each other. I don't know about anyone else, but on the association part of the SATs, I wouldn't have picked "night is to day, as evil is to skillful". Man, language is weird.

Inside Each One of Us Is...

2009-10-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

First off, I want to say to anyone who plans on seeing this movie to toss out any expectations you might have before doing so. Going to watch this while having ideas about what to expect will not prove fulfilling, and this movie really deserves the chance to be experienced for what it is, not what people think it should be. I can guarantee you that it will probably not be what most people are expecting, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, it's probably one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and certainly one of the most ambitious.

That makes it sound complicated, and on one hand it is, but mostly it's not. It's just made in a way that makes us think in ways we're not used to. This isn't a movie that champions the story, the important parts aren't what's said or what's done, it's what's felt. I really believe this is movie you have to experience emotionally, not intellectually, because it's ultimately about emotions that aren't fully comprehended but are nonetheless present. In some ways, it's difficult to experience because these emotions are present in just about everyone, but they're not always pleasant. It's a movie about childhood and what it's like to be a kid going through life transitions, and every kid has gone through them. Not in the same ways, but the feelings are probably pretty universal, and that's what makes it hard to watch at times.

It's not a feel-good movie the way we expect children's movies to be, it's more honest. I didn't find it depressing the way many people did, nor did I find it cathartic or uplifting. It's difficult to describe my response to it because I'm honestly not sure what I feel aside from respect for everyone involved in making it. It's a challenging movie, but it's not hard to understand when you stop trying to figure it out and just experience it.
The performances are fantastic. The kid playing Max, Max Records, never once seems like he's acting to me. This is a really challenging role for anyone, but particularly a kid because it's all internal. There are no Shakespearean soliloquies about what's going on with him, he doesn't try to explain it to anyone because he himself doesn't know what's going on inside him. But there are things going on, very specific things, that have to be projected for the audience to understand, and he does it phenomenally. The Things, too, are wonderful. The voice actors are all brilliant, especially James Gandolfini as Carol-- he's probably one of the most complex parts of the film aside from Max himself, and he just owns it.

But it's not even those performances, the actors inside the Thing suits never hit a wrong note with their body language, and the CGI expressions for their faces are some of the best animated acting I've seen done. There's so much subtlety in those faces, so many little things that hit emotional points with the audience in the brief flash they're onscreen. It's something you only notice in hindsight because I didn't notice it at all when I was watching it. That's how I know something is really done well. There was one part at the end with no words spoken, but to do so would have marred the emotional impact it had on me. It was probably the closest thing to an emotional climax the movie has, and it was beautiful because no one had to explain it.
I could try and talk about the film some more, but it's hard to do when you're trying to explain something like a feeling to a person who hasn't experienced it. (The film itself even does this a few times in the way that children explain things when they don't have the words.) So to the people interested in it, go see it, but leave your expectations and fuzzy childhood memories at the door. Leave all your baggage outside the theater, stop trying to make sense out of it, and just let the film be what it is. Doesn't mean you have to like it, and some people won't, even if they "get" it. But just try to take the film on its own terms and realize it's not the sort of film you're probably used to seeing-- it's trying something new. That alone makes it worth seeing in my book, regardless of how successful it is in the end.

"Moonlighting" and the Defense of Domestic Violence

2009-10-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

I've been watching a lot of the old Moonlighting show recently for a paper I'm writing for my History of Television class, and I've noticed a distinct change in tone from the writing in the third season. Previous seasons always tackled the idea of "the battle of the sexes" with the two leads, David (Bruce Willis) taking the role of the lowbrow, laid-back, street smart, sexist guy and Maddie (Cybill Shepard) taking the role of the uptight, uptown, aloof, cultured, feminist woman, butting heads over just about everything while clearly just wanting to rip each other's clothes off under it all. Season three was more of the same, but I can't help but notice a very discernible shift in loyalties on the part of the show itself. Instead of trying to present Maddie's side (and her character) as understandable and reasonably angry with her partner's grating and unprofessional behavior, it goes out of its way to construct her as an overly judgemental harpy who needs to be brought down a few pegs, preferably by her suddenly more reasonable and more often correct partner. Her character is harshly criticized and often shamed far more frequently than his is, and a much bigger deal is made about taming her 'shrewish' behavior than about confronting David's personality flaws-- in fact he's more frequently constructed as the sympathetic hero just looking out for her and trying to humanize her than before.

There are plenty of examples of this at work, like the Christmas episode which takes the Dickens approach to Maddie's humbug attitude: her staff is angry because she's keeping the office open until Christmas to work on a case they'd already accepted (I'd be angry, too), but she's been stressing about making ends meet since they have so few cases, even covering her employees' paychecks herself when there wasn't enough money in the company account, and on top of it all, her sick aunt, whom she'd been meaning to visit in the hospital but hadn't gotten to yet, died that morning. As sympathetically as the episode starts, it quickly goes on to show her how terrible she's been in wishing that she hadn't kept the business open by showing her how people's lives would have turned out without it-- Agnes the kindhearted receptionist wound up the cold, steely president of a greeting card company (supposed to be a reflection of Maddie herself), David wound up engaged to a supermodel and even bought Maddie's house because of "a very good year" which is never elaborated on, and Maddie herself wound up broke and alone, crashing her car into a wall. All this is to get her to repent her humbug ways and drop the case so everyone can have Christmas off. There is a token bit where the three people who had been particularly mean to her apologized when they found out about her aunt dying, but it's really Maddie who's shown to have the most to apologize for.

However, I feel the most blatant example of the shift in writing comes from the episode "The Man Who Cried Wife", only the second one of the season. Here, a man is shown coming home to his philandering wife, whom he strikes so hard, he kills her. He's so remorseful over this that he doesn't call the police or relatives, but instead drags her body to the woods, buries her, and doesn't say a word to anyone. Until he starts getting phone calls from her, that is. So he goes to hire some private detectives to figure out what's going on, but Maddie doesn't want a thing to do with a man who hit his wife, no matter how remorseful he may have felt about it afterwards. David disagrees and thus follows one of the most one-sided, flagrantly biased debates on the entire show.

Because we all know it's all right to hit someone as long as you feel really bad about it afterward and the person "had it coming". Come on. So after this, of course Maddie's so shamed by her irrational dislike of a man who killed his wife in a fit of passion and then buried her in the woods, that she apologizes and joins David on the case. David, as he so frequently is in these episodes, is coldly condescending and clearly supposed to represent the more "realistic" attitude about passion and spontaneity that excuses and forgives both the husband here and Maddie for their physical displays of anger. There's no point of contention that it was wrong for either of them because they were angry and provoked into behaving in such a way. (For my money, Maddie hit David way too much in the whole show, but I guess in the 80s it was still funny and acceptable for women to slap men because men were manly and could take it. Or something.) Once again, Maddie is shamed and brought down off her high horse while David gets to play the condescending educator who can sanctimoniously forgive her after the realizes the error of her ways.

I don't hate the whole show, really. But some of these episodes sit in a really icky place with me.

But Does She Wear a Wonder Bra...?

2009-10-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

I realized I hadn't made an animation-related post in a while, which must be something of a record for me, so time to fix that.

Okay, so I've never really been a Wonder Woman fan. No real reason behind it, I have nothing against the character, she just never really snagged my attention. I never saw the Linda Carter TV series, I never watched Super Friends, and the only WW comics I have, I actually bought for the Huntress mini-stories in the back. I've seen some Justice League cartoons, but she really never appealed to me in those-- she just seemed like a stodgy, stuck-up, humorless, statue with way too many superpowers (I had no idea she could fly, that seemed like overkill to me). She just seemed like they took Batman's personality (minus the genius-level intellect-- she's not stupid, just not a super-genius), and stuck it into a supermodel's body with Superman's powers and called it good. Others disagree and that's cool. I didn't have much investment in her before that and her portrayal there just put me off of her even more.

So when I heard about an animated WW movie coming to DVD, I wasn't really interested until I heard who the voice cast was. Kerri Russell does not conjure the image of a stony killjoy, and I'll watch pretty much anything with Nathan Fillion in it, since I think he's both dishy and fun. Add to that the fact that I happened to be watching someone on Deviantart (Lauren Montgomery) who turned out the be the director of this movie, and that was enough to spark some interest in me to see it.

It was a lot of fun. By far one of the better direct-to-DVD releases for superheroes I've seen so far, which was gratifying in its own right, but it also actually made me care about the character for the first time. I wish they'd make a TV series based around this, or at least a sequel, because I'd love to see more of this WW and the world she lives in. I really did have a blast watching it, and they did a good job of giving the characters some humanity and something for the viewer to identify with. You can understand why the Amazons would want to seclude themselves from the rest of the world, you can understand WW's frustration with the culture shock of a world run by men, as well as Steve's frustration at being criticized all the time.

When a girl kicks your butt, it means she likes you.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For people who don't know how the story goes, basically there's an island secluded from the rest of the world where the Amazons live-- in this version it's because waaaay back in the day, they were enslaved and abused by Ares, the Greek god of war and this was how Hera was able to give them time to heal-- and men are not allowed to set foot upon on pain of death. Hippolyte, the ruler of the island, wanted a daughter and made one out of clay (or in this case, beach sand) and the child was given life by the gods, along with other virtues such as strength, speed, wisdom, and beauty. Diana (they liked to mix and match Greek and Roman names, I guess) is the one who would become Wonder Woman, when years and years later a U.S. fighter pilot named Steve Trevor would crash land on their island and need an escort back home. Diana proves to be the most qualified for the job of ambassador, and since she's the only one who hasn't seen the outside world herself, she's by far the most eager to go. And so begins Princess Diana's adventures in "Man's World".

It takes a confident woman to wear that in public.

In this movie, Diana has another reason to leave the island as well-- when the Amazons defeated Ares thousands of years ago, Zeus imprisoned him on their island, but soon after Steve arrives, he escapes. Diana's mission is to both return Steve to the U.S. and to find Ares and stop him from wreaking havoc on the modern world. So she's got her work cut out for her on her first trip away from home.

Steve realizes too late that Amazons remove their sense of humor when they hit puberty.

Now as much fun as the movie is, it's not perfect. The 'battle of the sexes' that Diana and Steve engage in through most of it feels somewhat dated because of some of the points of contention. I can't speak for anyone else, but I haven't heard the issue of men opening doors for women brought up in like twenty years, but maybe I'm out of touch. It just felt like it missed the point sometimes, or left out a few decades of progress in gender relations. Steve's such a pig it's almost ridiculous at times, and that comes off as somewhat flat (he seriously tries to get Diana drunk while he takes her "sightseeing" at some hole in the wall bar), and he has this really off-the-mark speech in a hospital later that is just... sort of... ugh. He's so much of a pig through the movie it's sometimes hard to understand what she sees in him, at least in terms of romantic compatibility-- this makes me want to see if they could flesh him out a bit better in a sequel, since it felt like they fumbled with him in this.

Comparing sizes is evidently universal.

It also commits the faux pas of mistaking masculinity for strength, and in fact seems to have trouble validating traditionally feminine or intellectual traits. It sort of makes a token effort, but then undermines it almost immediately by defaulting back to the 'masculine' stuff. Given that so much of the film revolves around these ideas, I think it's a fair gripe, but the rest of it is so much fun, I don't have much trouble forgiving it.

They did a really nice job with the animation, too. I wanted to take stills of some of my favorite scenes because there are some really gorgeous compositions, but I'm on a new computer and haven't figured out how to do any of that yet. But they did a pretty decent job of giving it an 'epic' feel without the budget for an epic movie, and some of the fight sequences have some nice pieces of animation. I like the designs for the most part, though Steve's rather plain-looking and blah, which might have more to do with his coloring than anything else. But I like that the Amazons have some musculature and broader shoulders, and that they gave Diana a more "Greek" nose than she's traditionally drawn with. And people change their clothes, too! I like it when cartoon characters have more than one outfit to wear. There was one design that came out of left field and I'm sort of ambivalent about it (you'll know which one I'm talking about if you see it), but they tried something new, anyway, which I tend to like, even if the end result isn't what I personally would have gone for.

They never explained where the invisible jet came from. I don't know if I like that or not. I sort of do and sort of don't. It's pretty inconsequential either way, I just remember wondering about that. There are some other plot holes, too, but they're sort of spoilery, so I won't get into them.

Wondy's workout tapes sell big with horror fans too.

I will say that the big climactic showdown had some neat elements in it, particularly the big nod to the old Harryhousen sword and sandals movies from back in the day. I thought that was pretty cool. And I can't speak for anyone else, but I really, really enjoyed seeing WW take some pretty serious smackdowns and then get right back up again and return the favor. I find that immensely gratifying after years of seeing women either take minimal damage in fights or taking no part in them at all. I wouldn't want to see it all the time because then it would get boring, but it is really nice to see a woman get to be tough and resilient.

Overall, I'd really recommend it to anyone who might be interested. It's got flaws, yeah, but I just have so much fun watching it, they don't mar the experience for me.

IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Chai Tea"

2009-10-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

Masala Chai

Or "chai tea" as it's commonly referred to in the US. What most people don't know is that moniker's an oxymoron: "chai" means "tea" in many countries, including India. (Trivia: the Japanese word for tea, "-cha", is likely derived from the same term.) What most people are really referring to is masala chai, a popular drink from South Asia. As I understand it, "masala" is a word that refers to a given mixture of spices (chicken tikka masala, a very popular dish in Indian restaurants, refers to a different mix of spices from masala chai, but they both refer to specific mixtures in their own right), so "masala chai" translates to something like "spiced tea".

And while I haven't had the officially official stuff they make in India, I have had some from a couple of Indian restaurants where they didn't use a box mix. Seriously, it's so much better than the stuff you get at Starbucks. I've taken to making it myself at home, and it's really not hard. The worst part was trying to track down cardamom pods where I live, but now that I've done that, I can make as much delicious, creamy, cinnamony, gingery, peppery goodness as I can handle.

DARK SHADOWS: The Arrival of Good Ratings

2009-09-29T21:47:00.000-07:00

THE ARRIVAL OF BARNABAS COLLINS
Up to this point, the show had a fairly normal soap with a few minor exceptions, such as the ghost of Josette Collins and David's mother being a "Phoenix" as a climax. The dying ratings meant the show had to do something to really be noticed. And so...in episode 211, they bring in a VAMPIRE. Yes, won't go out in the day, must suck blood with fangs, allergic to garlic, sleeps in a coffin, middle aged 1960s teen idol....WHAT? Only in the 60s.

My father has a copy of this game, and I remember having great fun playing it.

Barnabas was so popular with the kids, he spawned toy models, bubblegum cards, board games, Halloween costumes...the list goes on. Interest in him even sparked paperback novels and comic books. How many kids nowadays come home from school to watch a daytime soap?

In simple words, the plot reads like this: Barnabas loves his family. Barnabas has been in a coffin for 170 years. Barnabas has lost a few of his marbles.Willie doesn't want to play Renfield. Barnabas doesn't give him a choice. Easy to follow, right? Classic elements ala Dracula.

Willie doesn't like being Barnabas's Whipping Boy.

Bring in the girl!

Maggie has been Vicky's friend since episode 1.

Maggie Evans. Maggie looks eerily like Josette. (Or so they say. That Josette portrait is pretty fuzzy) Could she be her reincarnation? No...because the ghost of Josette is still in the old house, watching over the family. Does Barnabas care? Not after being locked in a tomb for so long, he doesn't. Apparently, he has some unfinished business.

The Collins family takes Barnabas's claim at being a cousin from England at face value, and he soon moves into the old house, much to David's disdain. (that's where his ghost friend Josette lives) But who cares what the kid thinks? He still insists he's talking to ghosts!

"You mean...You're not a ghost?"

NEXT - DARK SHADOWS: THE ABDUCTION OF MAGGIE EVANS

DARK SHADOWS

2009-09-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

I grew up loving vampire lore. My favorite childhood vampire would have to be Barnabas Collins. That said, I recently began re watching the series Dark Shadows. As a child, I rarely saw much of the TV series. I don't think it was on TV at the time and I rarely saw a VHS copy, but whenever I could, I loved it. The only personal copy I had was of the movie House of Dark Shadows. Now I'm in the era of DVD glory! DVDs are inexpensive and easy to buy through the modern marvel of the Internet. I can now watch as much as I want as it comes in through Netflix! Although I'm already breaking down and buying DVD sets from Amazon.My love from the show is reconnected! True, it's badly preserved 1960s footage, often only kinoscope footage surviving, making it look decades older than reality, but there is a charm which prevails. Something romantic and slightly horrific about the clash of innocence and terror that forever curses the house of Collins.

I shall be adding arc summaries and my own personal observation and opinions of the famous dark soap from here on. I'll start with a quick overview of the boring things before the show took off. :)

Vicky looks forward to a bright new life at Collinwood

THE ARRIVAL OF VICTORIA WINTERS
At the beginning of Dark Shadows, a young woman arrives to Collinwood to take on a job as a governess for the prestigious Collins family. The boy she was charged to care for, David Collins, is extremely disturbed and even tries to kill his father. David believes he talks with ghosts and loves to play in the abandoned house, known as "the Old House" which used to house the collin's ancestors.

The bright future is often gloomy and filled with psychos.
Many generic soap opera things happen. Blackmail, murder, kidnapping, unintelligent romance, etc...David's mother is revealed as Laura Collins. She wants to burn him alive to make him a PHOENIX like herself. Cuckoo? A bit. Of course, she doesn't succeed and dies a horrible death. The beginning was only interesting to me as a precursor for things to come.
Tragic Phoenix is Tragic.

NEXT - THE ARRIVAL OF GOOD RATINGS

PULPS!

2009-09-29T03:40:00.000-07:00

In the past few years, I've seen a resurgence of American pulp reprints. This is exciting for me, since the stories in these pulps influenced so much of the super hero and detective stories we know today.What is a pulp? A cheaply printed fiction book, very popular in the 1920s, 1930 , 1940s and on to the 1950s to a lesser extent due to hieghtened censorship.

What sort of things did they print? Everything from disturbingly morbid sci fi-horror to stories for the bored housewife about steamy romances. The covers were often beautifully painted teasers, half naked attractive young people being tormented by wild deformed cannibals on a space ship? Sounds pretty normal.

One of my favorite parts of the original pulps are the aforementioned covers. Many of the subsequent reprints are of the text only, and lacking in the marvelous full cover paintings that madeup each issued book, or the beautiful black and white pen drawings, often very detailed, that were scattered throughout the actual books. Occasionally I see a reprint that contains these aspects, and those are the ones I find myself drawn to buy.

I've read quite a bit of the Weird Tales reprints, although the variety tends to lack, since H.P. Lovecraft tends to dominate as much as possible. Cthulhu sells apparently. To be honest, I'd rather read a good ghost story or a unique take on an folklore. No offence to the Cthulhu Mythos, but you just don't make it to my nightmares. That said, H.P. Lovecraft was a genius at the pulp genre, but as a 'junk fiction' writer, he never did see his fanbase peak.

The pulps created a new outlet for crime writers. Endless detective stories, adventure, romance, and horrors could be released every month and easily bought by the average person. A pulp book averaged about 10-25 cents - a far cry from the $15 average of today. (Just one of those 10 cent books of yesteryear now will put you back a good $80-$300) Every month, and sometimes twice a month, a reader could pick up their favorite crime titles cheaply at even grocery stores, or so I'm told by those generations who witnessed it.

In an era without television, and with limited radio channels, reading was one of the few ways to find stories that were guaranteed to peak your interest.
Me? I buy every reprint of The Shadow I can find! The dialog might be dated, the titles mellow dramatic, and the subjects politically incorrect, but I enjoy a good detective story sluthed by an invisible spy with an endless repertoire of tricks! Who Knows...What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men? Nothing like a good maniacal laugh.

Speaking of racist, if a character wasn't white, you can bet they'd carry most of the dark stereotypes that aren't allowed in fiction today. Fu Manchu was probably the most infamous evil asian, fullfilling the role of the mad scientist and classic antihero of his own books. His popularity spun dozens of evil asian titles. The racism doesn't stop there, it often portrays savage indians (both Native American and East Indians alike), and uneducated manservent blacks are fairly normal. While reading anything from another time, it's important to remember that values and ideals have changed a lot over the past 50 years.

Pulps have brought us many famous heros we associate with other media, such as Tarzan, Flash Gordon , or lessor known cult stars such as Buck Rogers and John Carter of Mars. Famous heros such as Batman were admited by their creators to be inspired by The Shadow. Film Noir took many of it's formulas and cliches from the detective pulps of the 1930s. Where would we be without our cheap fiction?

IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Postmodernism"

2009-09-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's been brought to my attention that I've used the term "postmodern" without explaining what it means, and have thus exposed myself to be the pretentious film student that I am. As though this whole blog didn't do that anyway. So instead of finding out what the deal with "chai tea" is, like I'd originally planned, you get this. Be sure to thank Stacy, everyone. ;)

Postmodernism

Well, before you can define postmodernism, you have to define modernism. Which I don't want to do because this will take all night, and I freely admit that my understanding of this is not completely solid because I got a crash course in it for about a half hour one day, but here we go anyway. Modernism arose out of a huge social change around the end of the nineteenth century, with people like Freud and Einstein and Darwin running around, blowing huge holes in the established "common sense" of the day. The entire foundation on which people had based a lot of their beliefs about the world and even themselves and how they functioned were being soundly rocked and this created a lot of anxiety and uncertainty.

Modernism was the reaction to this, and to be quite honest, I'm pretty fuzzy on what exactly it entails. From what I understand, it shares many qualities with postmodernism, but modernism is always striving for underlying meaning, and a solid take on what is really "true". Postmodernism then takes the stance that meaning is subjective and "truth" and "reality" are shaped by an individual's perspective, not by any inherent qualities these ideas posses themselves. It also delves more into ambiguity, allowing for much more uncertainty and ambivalence than the more logical modernism does.

David Lynch is a quintessential example of a postmodern filmmaker because his works are very ambiguous in terms of meaning, and "truth" and "reality" are all very subjective. His stuff is also typically surreal, confusing, and in parts upsetting, so I wouldn't recommend running out to rent Lost Highway to see what I'm talking about unless you like that sort of thing. I tend to see Quentin Tarantino as postmodern, or at least partaking in postmodern elements, and there are loads of other filmmakers, artists, writers, etc. that do the same.

That's probably the best I can do to try and explain it, but it's a very significant movement in modern culture, so if you're still confused, there are probably some very helpful resources out there.

Also, next time you hear a word you don't know, write it down and look it up when you get a chance. Good way to learn stuff and you don't have to pay tuition rates.

Next time: What's up with this "chai tea" stuff, anyway?

Need to start saving my pennies for popcorn

2009-09-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

After browsing through Moviebox (it's been a while, I'm really behind on my trailers), and seeing some things I didn't know were coming out (Percy Jackson? could be fun, I love mythology, especially Greek, but Chris Columbus hasn't wowed me in a while, so we'll see), there are a few in particular that I will definitely be parking my butt in a theater for.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey. Those are four of my favorite actors working today, there is no way I'm not going to a movie with all of them in it, especially if the movie is a comedy about psychic military experiments that is evidently based on a real story.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, written and directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer (and I think I saw Tom Waits, too, score!). This is one of those movies that I'd see no matter who was in it because it just looks incredible visually. But beyond really great visual effects, it looks... well, imaginative. I love imagination in my awesome-looking special effects.

The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson, starring Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci, and a bunch of other people I'm too lazy to look up. This is one of Stacy's favorite books, so I was curious when I saw the trailer (at Julie and Julia, of all things) at how faithful this looked to the original story. She said it seemed pretty close, and I must admit that I'm very intregued this got green-lit and that it seems to have a decent budget to boot. I will be seeing it.

Whip It, written and directed by Drew Barrymore, starring Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore, Zoe Bell, Juliette Lewis, and Jimmy Fallon. This just looks fun as hell, and I am in full support of Zoe Bell getting more facetime in movies.

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

2009-09-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

A new thing that will reoccur whenever I think a word has been misrepresented, misunderstood, or even not understood at all for long enough and feel like getting on my semantic soapbox. Also because I love that quote and the movie it's from.

Feminism

Feminism is not:

-about hating/bashing/mocking/oppressing men

-outdated, unneeded, or irrelevant in today's society

-touted by bitter women who are too ugly to "get a man"/lesbians who hate men

-touted only by women

-anti-femininity/stay at home moms/family/marriage/love/makeup/sexuality/beauty

Feminism is:

-about promoting equality and respect between all genders

-an increasingly complex topic in today's society

-touted by people of all shapes, sizes, ages, genders, sexual preferences, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, and levels of the popular ideal of physical attractiveness

-about people of any gender having the ability to choose their lifestyle, profession, education, style of dress, sense of aesthetics (as much as anyone choses that), hairstyle, romantic/sexual partners, and opinions-- and most especially then not restricting the rights of anyone else to do the same

-still incredibly relevant and important on a global scale (yes, developed Western countries too) because sexism does, in fact, still exist

-often debated amongst even self-proclaimed feminists because cultural ideals and personal experiences differ from region to region and person to person, and sexism is not always blatantly obvious or free from controversy or ambivalence-- this is why discussion, debate, questions, and expression are so fundamentally important to any subject or movement

Just hope they use their powers for good

2009-09-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

So who else has seen a movie and felt completely mislead by the trailer you'd seen for it beforehand? I'm sometimes amazed, even now, of just how important movie trailers are to get right, and easy they are to manipulate. Seriously, it's so easy to make a mediocre movie look fun or a good movie look boring, to say nothing of how easy it is to even switch the genre. In cooking, it's said 'the first bite is with the eye', meaning the appearance of the food can set up a person's expectation for the taste, and for me, the trailer is that same idea for the film. It takes a lot of skill to make a good trailer that offers enough to inform the viewer of what the plot is without giving away too much of the good stuff, and keeping it all under three minutes.

I was just reminded of this in part because of the trailers I'd been seeing for Jennifer's Body and then reading about what the writer and director have been saying about it, along with other people either anticipating it or who have seen it. And I was reminded again today about it because of browsing through my Youtube favorites and seeing how many fake movie trailers I had in there. There are some really well-made ones there, and probably still more I don't know about. I figured I'd share some of my favorites, since all my other blog posts are half-finished and I'm still moving. (Sorry for the links instead of imbedded videos, I just got a laptop and for some reason can't figure out how to copy the entire imbed code.)

The Shining as a romantic comedy.
Mary Poppins as a horror movie.
A Goofy Movie if it had been directed by David Lynch.
Titanic 2, featuring footage and dialogue from possibly every movie ever made.

"Jennifer's Body"-- not a review

2009-09-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a very short break from my attempts at moving today to make a really lazy post. With autumn looming large and Halloween decorations already springing up, my thoughts are beginning to turn to the spooky. Now I'm not an avid horror hound the way Stacy and Cindy are, to be sure, but I've always been a little macabre and am a big fan of creative and effective stories in any medium and genre. Having said that, I really wasn't interested in the movie Jennifer's Body that opens today, based on the ads I'd seen, and figured it was just another mindless horror/slasher film with lots of T&A and gratuitous violence. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but it doesn't really interest me-- I tend to get bored and start imagining what the families of the victims must go through when they find out what's happened to their sons and daughters, or wonder if they would have outgrown their teenage assholishness and gone on to have a good life if some axe-wielding psychopath hadn't decided they deserved to die for having sex outside of marriage or doing drugs. I'm really not the target audience for these movies, I just don't get the entertainment value in watching people die.

So my interest in this movie was approximately nil, but then I started seeing posts about it in some of the blogs I follow like Feministing and Women & Hollywood, and I found out that the film was written by Juno scribe and outspoken feminist Diablo Cody and directed by Girlfight creator Karyn Kusama. My interest was now piqued. Could this film be more than the ads made it out to be? It sure wouldn't be the first time, especially since the ads I'd been seeing were airing during Adult Swim, which shamelessly caters to the teenage and twenty-something male crowd, so they'd pick the ads with the most gratuitous shots of Megan Fox's cleveage possible. Maybe I hadn't given the movie a fair chance and it could be really interesting. Unfortunately, I can't give an opinion because I haven't seen it, nor will I anytime soon-- I have too many other movies on my list to see first, like Inglourious Basterds and 9. But I thought since it'll probably be a little bit before I get to it, I'd link to some articles about it that gave me things to mull over. (I'm also secretly hoping that one of my co-bloggers might take up the helm and post some related thoughts on this or other movies they've seen. Hint hint.)

Sister Hacked by Alexandra Gutierrez at The American Prospect.
Jennifer's Body by Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood.
Diablo Cody IS a Feminist by Melissa Silvertein at Women & Hollywood.
"Jennifer's Body": Why Hollywood Apparently Can't Make a Feminist Slasher Movie by Sarah Ball at Newsweek.

The Terror of Lois Lane

2009-09-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Iconic AND sexy. Don't get me wrong, the bad boys like Batman turn my crank, too, but I still maintain that there's something sexy about an over-sized boy scout like Superman.

I recently saw Superman: The Movie (1978).

It was really, really WEIRD.

I had seen it before of course; seems like it was on in a constant loop during my childhood. We even had it on disc before we had it on vhs. But I doubt I'd sat and watched it all the way through in probably twenty-five years; I was in single digits and low ones at that when last Mr. Reeves and I met.

Two of my nephews wanted to watch it on Netflix's instant watch thing a few days ago, so I got it running, and soon got sucked into it myself. The opening is great: the shots of young Clark Kent, loved by his adoptive parents but ostracized by his peers was alternately sweet and heart breaking. This was for me an almost perfect metaphor for high school regardless of your planet of origin. In high school I knew I was full of amazing skills that none of my classmates could see; I was too shy, they were too busy, we were all too busy obsessing over ourselves to actually BE ourselves. Granted, I can't fly (yet. YET.), I certainly can't outrun a speeding train (though I CAN have an asthma attack and fall down faster than a speeding bullet), and crap knees keep my bounding to a minimum, unlike Clark, but I think everyone feels like they have wonderful secrets inside themselves.

He finally manages to get something of a one-up on his rude high school compatriots, and then his dad keels over dead. I think that was probably a Pretty Bad Day for the Kent clan. He then sets off to the warmest looking arctic set I've ever seen to find out how to unlock his own secrets (seriously, no visible breath and he's not even wearing a scarf for crying out loud!) . During this time span in the good ol' Fortress of Solitude, he becomes Superman, and learns to harness his own amazing powers for good; he then heads for Metropolis to become a reporter for the Daily Planet. There he meets Lois Lane, the future Missus Superman, and also Lex Luthor, who is played SO over the top by Gene Hackman that I firmly believe he had altitude-related nose bleeds all over the place then and probably still to this day. It's your basic good beats really fucking manic evil story.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about Lois Lane, as portrayed by Margot Kidder. I'm here to talk about how she occasionally scared the SHIT out of me in this film. I know that she's had issues with manic depression during her life, so I have no idea if this is bleed over from that, but when Lois was called to be excitable or frantic, she was TERRIFYING. When it came to the minutiae of the role, the fine details of Lois' emotional responses, particularly to Superman, she was superb, and came across as almost heart-breakingly vulnerable.

Here she's gorgeous..

However, when she was worked up she looked like ghoul that had acquired a taste for human flesh. Part of the problem was the lipstick she was wearing (or maybe the hue on the television that I watched this on); it was a strange shade of pink that made her teeth look kinda yellow, so when she'd freak out she looked like she had a mouth full of coyote teeth. In a few scenes I was legitimately concerned for Superman's well-being; no male can survive a hardcore man eater, not even the man of steel himself!

I don't think any of this terror was Ms. Kidder;s fault, I got the impression from other performances in the role that the actors had been instructed to play their roles "big"; manic Lois was in keeping with hyper Lex and spastic Clark. But it was still occasionally pants-wetting for me.

...and here she's terrifying!

I also wanted to talk a little about Christopher Reeves, namely that he was awesome in this role. He was appropriately flustered and bumbling as Clark, and MAN could he fill out a set of red underoos as Superman! More than that, though, seeing this movie with more adult eyes I saw that the man was a legitimately gifted actor. I think he got this part not only because he looked the part, but because he was also a very talented. He gave Clark an impish quality that was nice; you could tell he kinda enjoyed giving Lois shit, whether she knew he was doing it or not.

This is an image that even now, at 32 years of age, instills me with comfort. Having never been saved by Superman, I have no idea why this is.

He also seemed a bit shy, which is an interesting idea for Superman. Batman and Superman to me have it almost switched around: Bruce Wayne is the disguise, Batman in the reality. But Superman is really Clark Kent, even if it's not entirely the Clark Kent that the world sees. Clark is more confident as Superman, but who wouldn't be? It's like trolls on the internet: it's easy to be assured and confident when no one knows who you really are. Clark just wants to be near Lois, and he'll do it as Superman if he has to.

Seriously, look at that. LOOK AT THAT!

Overall it was intersting to rewatch; now I wanna see the sequels again, mostly so I can see Clark and Lois gedditOWN. Some parts of it are genius: Superman's scream of denial when he rescues Lois too late, Lois in quieter moments, Jimmy Olsen as a huge dork, etc. Some parts are hilariously silly, like the "rock slide" that was clearly pebbles (in slow motion, no less) being poured into a puddle. The dangling helicopter scene was wonderful while Lois freaking out was the stuff of nightmares.

He really rocks that look, even with that stupid spit curl.

I will close this with one thing of note: NO ONE with glasses adjusts them that way. No one. REMEMBER THAT, HOLLYWOOD!

"Brendan and the Secret of Kells"

2009-08-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to do a quick promotion of this movie that I just saw today. It's not released in the U.S. yet, but there are a few places to find it online. The design in some respects really reminded me of Richard Williams's The Thief and the Cobbler, and it's just a gorgeous movie in its own right.

"Freedom, Beauty, Truth, and Love"

2009-08-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

(I’m beginning to realize how few non-post-modern things are on my list. Wow, never noticed that before.)

Okay, well I realize that this movie tends to polarize viewers—most either love it or hate it with a fiery passion with not many feeling indifferent—and it tends to get compared to Titanic a fair amount, so this might get interesting. I myself fall into the ‘love it’ category and have never seen Titanic, so obviously this is going to be very biased. Wait, I never saw Titanic but I love a big, sappy musical that oozes romanticism in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century setting with doomed lovers? How can that be? Well I’ll tell you.
Firstly, I am a fan of director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet). I don’t tend to get hugely emotionally invested in a lot of movies, especially ones that revolve so heavily around romance and melodrama, but Luhrmann has this uncanny ability to suck me in, no holds barred, and make me invest every atom of my being into what he’s doing onscreen. Maybe because he not only doesn’t pretend that he’s doing anything but blatantly manipulating his viewers, nor that he’s making anything but melodrama—in fact he makes it hyper-dramatic to an almost surreal extent. You’re not under any delusions whatsoever that what you’re watching is real, nor are you supposed to. That was the point of his self-proclaimed “Red Curtain Trilogy”, to express heightened emotions through methods that constantly keep the audience aware that they are watching a film: dance, Shakespearian dialogue, and singing. Of course they’re overwrought visual extravaganzas, that’s the point of them. I go right along for the ride, delighted to get out of my head for a bit and experience something more visceral.
So naturally, I love the spectacle, too. Catherine Martin’s amazing costume designs really shine in this film, since there’s very little restraint she has to exercise in terms of historical accuracy. This is a fantasy world this is taking place in, after all, the Moulin Rouge that existed in the mind of everyone who never saw it firsthand. Every sort of excess is available to those with the money to afford it, and it’s a combination of bordello, dance hall, Vegas show, and Hollywood fantasy all rolled into one big surreal jelly roll and topped off with a dollop of Indian orientalism and some sparklers for good measure. It was largely touted as being the first American Bollywood picture at the time, not only for its opulent Indian-themed play-within-a-film climax, but because it ran the gamut of emotion from screwball comedy to operatic tragedy and just about everything in between. I’d never seen anything quite like it at the time, since Indian cinema was still pretty foreign to me, and I was dazzled by the spectacle and engaged emotionally with the screen in a way I rarely am with most films. It’s one of very few films where I exited the theater wanting to turn around and immediately buy another ticket to watch it again, and one of very few films I’ve attended where a portion of the audience left before it was over.
I think some people didn’t like the directing style, citing it as too ‘manic’. Other people don’t like that they used pre-existing songs for the musical, feeling that it was either lazy or disrespectful to the original artists. I thought it was a very smart move from both a problem-solving angle as well as a filmmaking angle: Christian (Ewan McGregor) is supposed to be a brilliant poet the likes of which no one has seen before, but unless the filmmakers happened to know such a brilliant poet (one that would not alienate audiences and who would make the other characters’ reactions of awe and amazement understandable to a modern audience), the songs were going to be very difficult if not impossible to get right. The solution to use pre-existing modern songs conveys the idea that Christian is brilliant and ahead of his time, and also elicits an immediate emotional response from the audience because most people are already familiar with the song in question. Since the songs in a musical are designed to progress the audience from one emotional plateau to another, this is a particularly innovative and, to me effective, idea.

Another reason I love this movie is its multi-layered subtext. Luhrmann loves referencing old stories, like with Strictly Ballroom drawing from both David and Goliath and the ugly duckling, and Romeo + Juliet referencing… okay, Romeo and Juliet. The stories referenced for Moulin Rouge! are the opera La Boheme and the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I am an absolute sucker for Greek mythology, particularly the ones involving journeys to the Underworld, and Orpheus and Eurydice has one of the most classic representations of the tragic ending, with it stemming from the protagonists’ own actions and good intentions. Because the bulk of the movie is actually the memories of Christian and the present shots of him writing the account are dull and bereft of the vibrancy, color, and fantasy of his tale, it could be seen as his life in reality or the present which he is slowly coming to accept. I believe there is a note of his coming to terms with the past at the end, which is more of a positive note than both the Orpheus myth and the La Boheme opera are prone to give because it does give glimpses of the surviving hero’s coming to terms with events and forces beyond his control. The romantic ideal of love overcoming all obstacles that was repeated throughout the film was unrealistic—the audience knows his lover is dying, and even if the other conflicts resolve in their favor, there is nothing anyone can do to heal her—and his acceptance of this is the final pin in his journey through the Underworld into adulthood.
However much I love the more sensible underlying message, Moulin Rouge! is, at its heart, a celebration of art and passion and the problems that come with both. The artists of this world are colorful and creative, but poor and unable to finance the proper presentation of their vision, so they must turn to the uncreative Duke and convince him to invest in their vision. This ultimately gives him control over the content of their production and if he doesn’t approve of an aspect, they must either change it or manipulate him into being content with their ideas. (I have a very hard time believing that this is in no way analogous to trying to make a big studio film in Hollywood, by the way.) But of course the Bohemian poets defy the orders of the Duke and perform their original ending in a huge emotional climax, complete with pyrotechnic explosions, and are met with thunderous applause from their audience in response. Because artistic vision is what’s most important in artistic endeavors, and artists being censored by their financial backers is ridiculous to me. I believe in free speech and free expression, and ultimately, that’s what this movie is, both in-text and in its being, and I applaud Luhrmann for making films that stick to his vision, regardless of audience or critical response.

(And no, I haven’t seen Australia yet, but I will get to it.)

"The One Who Will Revolutionize the World"

2009-08-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

A quick note: Yeah, yeah, I suck. This was a hard series to write about and I'm still not entirely happy with what I have here, but I'm making myself post it anyway just so I can move on. Fairy Tale Week has been extended, since I've been bad about posting and I have a lot more stuff I'd like to cover. Also, when I post stuff about movies or shows from Japan, I'm almost always using the original Japanese voice track, not dubs. I'm not a fan of dubbing under the best of circumstances, but a lot that I've encountered are just absolutely atrocious, and Utena is among them. Avoid it if you watch it.

Note 2: All images are borrowed from Empty Movement, one of the best and most comprehensive websites devoted to the show.

It’s difficult for me to know where to start with this series. Just on its own it’s incredibly dense, complex, highly stylized and symbolic, bizarre, and downright hard to explain, but those reasons and more are why I find it so compelling. I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it. For me, it was something I happened to see at exactly the right moment in my life to make a big impact, so it’s a personal thing for me to try and talk about. All this makes it difficult for me to know how to even try to explain why I like this so much, and a lot of people who see it probably won’t get the same thing out of it I did. It really isn’t a show for everyone; it requires a love of being completely confused by something that you know on some level has meaning but requires consideration, analysis, and a desire to do some research to understand. I am very much one of those people, but many people are not, and that’s okay, I just feel the need to explain in case someone decides to call me pretentious for liking it.

So the basic story is about a teenage girl named Utena Tenjou and her quest to get through junior high school, become a prince, and find her own prince. (“Prince” in this case is a term popular in Japan for girls to use to describe their dream guys. I didn’t realize how widespread the concept was until years later when I heard it cropping up in other shows. This show just took it and made it more literal.) It starts out very much like a magical-girl shoujo anime (“shoujo” being a genre of anime aimed at young and teenage girls which typically focus on things like romance and friendship—the magical girl sub-genre involves superhero-type adventure stories with the protagonist fighting against evil forces with magical powers; think Sailor Moon or even She-Ra) with some gender-bending elements added in (Utena dresses in a modified boy’s school uniform and does typically masculine things like play sports and refers to herself with the traditionally masculine “boku” instead of the gender-neutral “watashi”, presumably stemming from her desire to become a prince instead of a princess). However, there are some unusual elements mixed in that allude to how bizarre it will become later on, and believe me, when “normal” involves a giant castle rotating upside down over a dueling platform hundreds of feet in the air, and swords coming out of people’s chests, “bizarre” takes on a whole new meaning.

The fairy tale tropes in this are pretty obvious, since they’re pretty much all European fairy tales being referenced, like Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, but I can also see a lot of Buddhist, Daoist, and possibly Hindu ideas at work in more subtle ways, such as the nature of siblings (which is explored in several different relationships) and the nature of the school that all the characters attend. The main story is initially set up as a fairy tale as well, with the brave young prince figure—Utena—drawn into a world (both literally and figuratively) of fantastic occurrences, danger, conspiracies, lies, and betrayal for the sake of rescuing the princess figure—Anthy Himemiya—from a series of ritualistic duels carried out by the school’s student council. The winner of the duel “wins” Anthy along with the fantastic power she’s supposed to possess that can “revolutionize the world”. Each duelist has his or her own reasons for wanting to attain this goal, even though the exact meaning of the phrase is never clearly explained. Utena doesn’t want this power, she only wants to protect Anthy from the people who use her as an object in realizing their own ambitions, and as the current champion, must constantly fight duels to retain possession of Anthy. She is also searching for the mysterious prince who comforted her as a child after the death of her parents—this half-remembered person is the one who inspired her desire to become a prince herself and the idea of him has been intensely romanticized in her mind over the years. She can’t remember what he looked like, or even the exact events of their meeting apart from him comforting her by her parents’ coffins, but he gave her a ring as a means of finding him again. As it so happens, the same ring design is used by the duelists at the school she attends, which is another reason why she is drawn into the duels.

I’ll tell you right now, the series does not end the way you’re probably thinking it does. I had absolutely no idea what I was in store for when I started watching it the first time. The director/co-writer of the series, Kunihiko Ikuhara, really did set it up like a typical shoujo series at the beginning; it’s light, fluffy, bizarre (there’s an episode where Anthy’s terrible exploding curry switches her personality with Utena’s, and surfing elephants are eventually involved), silly, and sometimes sappy. The casual viewer will think they have the ending pegged within the first few episodes, and might continue watching if they feel like seeing it play out, especially if they watch some of the later duels in the first story arc. There are two episodes in that first early collection that really kept me watching, since shoujo isn’t typically a genre I’m drawn to, but I’m intrigued by things that surprise me, and there are some surprises in there. But the really interesting stuff for first-time viewers is what starts to happen after the first thirteen episodes, when the series gets deeper down the rabbit hole. It’s really difficult to get into specifics without either having to explain a lot, giving away too many secrets, or both, but there is a definite tone shift during the Black Rose storyline that continues through the end of the series. Which isn’t to say that the first story arc is pointless to re-watch, but there are a lot of great things in there for people who’ve already seen the end, especially if they’re looking to understand Anthy more. There’s a lot of revealing detail about her in those early episodes, it’s just very cleverly hidden. (Incidentally, I've heard it said that Ikuhara is a fan of David Lynch, and I can really see how that could be plausible; there's a definite Lynch-vibe to his stuff.)

Another strange aspect I would be remiss to not mention are the duel choruses. There’s a new one in nearly every episode, one for each duel fought in the entire series, and they’re usually a bit off-putting for most people just getting into the series. I hated them at first, but they’re actually one of my favorite things about the series now—I even bought a CD of songs written for, but not used in the series. As much as I’ve been able to find out, the songwriter in question, J. A. Seazer, was something of a cult student favorite in Japan in the 1960s, including of Ikuhara’s. As the story goes, when Ikuhara approached him about doing some music for the series, Seazer was intrigued by the ‘revolutionary’ theme and agreed. The lyrics to his songs alone often garner much scrutiny and analysis from fans because they’re so densely populated with scientific, philosophical, religious, and mythological terms that they can be difficult to understand.

I’m trying to think of a way to succinctly sum up why I’m so fond of this series and why it affected me as much as it did. I contribute a large portion of my interest in film analysis to it because not only is this a series that demands to be analyzed, it’s one of the first times I remember being deeply moved by something that I could not articulate or even understand myself. It is a challenging series in a lot of ways and seems to become more so the deeper into it you get. It’s about more than just fairy tales, it’s very much about the confusion and pain of adolescence, of finding one’s self-identity, the fluidity and inexplicableness of human dynamics, relationships, and sexuality, and the necessity of letting go of the things that keep one mired in the past and unable to move forward. It’s about gender relationships and societal expectations and stigmas, and I think most especially for me, it’s about waking up out of our preconceived notions of what all of this means and trying to see the world for what it really is instead of what I might think it’s supposed to be. In attempting to understand what this series was saying, I had to come to terms with a lot of my own preconceptions and ideas, some of which I wasn’t aware I had. It challenged me to change the way I viewed the potential of media, the way I viewed the world, and the way I viewed myself and some viewpoints I wasn’t aware I held. I don’t think the series itself changed my life, but viewing it at the point I was at was like a slap in the face about some things. Not everyone is going to have that same experience, but I’ve met other people since then who have had similar experiences with it, so I think there’s something to it. Regardless, I really think the series is worth looking at because it does so well at setting up and then subverting expectations, and really trying to say something. Whether it succeeds at it is of course up to personal interpretation, but I think it is a challenging show that asks questions of its viewers that many shows don’t.

Whoops!

2009-08-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the interruption, I haven't been feeling very well the past couple of days and the next fairy tale on my list is complicated for me to write about. I'll have it up tonight, and then I'll try and double up on the last ones so I make the Friday deadline.