A glass of papaya juice

Sex, Love, Feminism: Jean Rhys and Julia Leigh's "Sleeping Beauty"

2011-12-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

I first read Jean Rhys in college, Voyage in the Dark, in a modernism class. It's funny: I wasn't crazy about the class itself (it was fine), but I adored practically everything we read: Mrs. Dalloway, Women in Love, Portrait of an Artist, The Waste Land. And Jean Rhys. I loved Rhys. Particularly her language: so direct and blunt it was disarming -- the only way, really, to communicate life's harsh, absurd cruelties.

These cruelties, for Rhys as well as her protagonists, included poverty, sexual exploitation and alcoholism. A white Creole female living in England, Rhys was in almost every way an outsider. And she wrote about colonialism, sexism, class and morality with unsparring, cool clarity.

For December the book group my friends and I formed (we read lady authors!) picked Rhys' Wise Sargasso Sea, which she wrote in 1966, more than 30 years after Voyage in the Dark. Indeed, when Sargasso was published Rhys had been living in exile, the town drunk in Devon, England. She was, until the late '50s when a fan tracked her down, presumed dead. And then Sargasso ended up being her masterpiece -- a feminist, post-colonial prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre that completely shatters your notions about the characters in that older book. So badass.

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Rochester's first wife, Antoinette Cosway -- the mad Creole woman in the attic whom, in Brontë's book, Rochester was tricked into marrying and who prevents him and Jane Eyre from being together. Rhys was angered by the classic novel's clichéd treatment of the exotic foreign woman as insane, dangerous and evil, so she wrote a devastating account of how colonialism, racism and exploitation (of one's sex, economic position and family history) could drive a bright yet innocent young woman to madness. Like Rhys, and like Voyage's Anna, Antoinette is an outsider: a white Creole, the daughter of a former slaveowner (now dead) and a woman driven insane by the death of her baby son, an heiress living in poverty and later isolation, an independent woman who has no control over her own destiny, and, finally, young bride of an Englishman who seems impossibly foreign and remote and who marries her for her money. She is exploited by almost everyone around her: by those (the natives, as well as Mr. Rochester) who want her money, and by those who want her for sex. No wonder she went crazy!

A couple of the other women in my book group were frustrated with how helpless Antoinette was. Yet, while Antoinette is largely a victim of the society Wide Sargasso Sea is that Antoinette is not just an innocent, one-dimensional victim: While she is largely powerless, she's also cynical, agnostic, astute and highly sexual -- and these attributes aren't what in the end condemn her to a life locked in an attic in England. And she's actually a lot like Jane in Jane Eyre. Both have troubled childhoods, have a detached, cynical view of humanity and are intelligent and artistic. Both are also -- despite Jane's somewhat puritanical morality -- aware of their sexuality: Remember that Jane, though she at first leaves Rochester when she finds out he is married, she rejects the boring minister who later tries to woo her because she isn't in love with him and returns to Rochester, consumed by her longing for him.

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After discussing Wide Sargasso Sea over pumpkin waffles and mimosas, I went to see Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, about a perpetually broke college student (Lucy, played by Emily Browning) who takes a job as a Sleeping Beauty, a prostitute whose clients pay to do anything to her while she is in a drug-induced slumber. The movie seemed like something a young Jean Rhys would have created if she lived today and made films.

First, Lucy is a contemporary version of the modern Rhys woman: an outsider driven by her poor socio-economic standing, her ambition and her sex. She's also partly a victim of all three of these things. She uses her sexuality in order to get money to allow her to realize her ambitions and rise above her class: Here, her immediate ambition is to finish school (we have no idea what she plans to do after or even what she's studying). Yet -- like Voyage's Anna and Sargasso's Antoinette -- she can only handle so much exploitation and degradation before she breaks.

Yet there is the sense that Lucy is more adept at navigating the ruthless, cold modern world. Her clients, after all, are also victims -- of their sexual urges and desires (there's the guy who can't get it up but pays to talk vile to her exquisite corpse and lick her face), their age, their immense wealth, their loneliness -- and she exploits their needs and shame as much as they exploit her body. There's something sad about these transactions, something tragic and human, which makes them even more unsettling and complex than if they were just paying to have sex.

Then there's the tone: straightforward, cool and detached, like Rhys. (Take the scene where Lucy's future employers prod and examine her fair flesh to make sure she passes muster or the scene where Lucy's madame and her john discuss life and death at the foot of the Sleeping Beauty's bed, composed to look like a painting.) It's refusal to make moral judgements on any of its characters has lead critics to call it frustrating, opaque and empty. Well, it is frustrating and opaque, but that's what gives it its richness.

But despite its clinical treatment of the body, Lucy doesn't just see sex as a means to an end (i.e. money). As cooly as she treats her body ("My body is not a temple," she sneers when her employer says she will not be penetrated during work), there is a sense that she does derive something out of her sexual encounters. She does, after all, get intimate with a few other guys, presumably without asking for cash. And she does, after several jobs as a Sleeping Beauty, become obsessed with finding out what happens to her while she's under the ether. There is something about sex and about human desire that fascinates her, though she can't quite place or understand it.

Also, like Sargasso, Sleeping Beauty is a subversive retelling of a beloved classic, one that exposes its predecessors retrograde, anti-feminist message and shatters the idea that love can conquer even the most insurmountable obstacles (a curse in Sleeping Beauty, an inconvenient marriage in Jane Eyre). And it implicates us too. I think that presenting Lucy as somewhat of a blank canvas (her motivations are vague, her background and character growth scant), Leigh invites the audience -- like her johns -- to project their own ideas, prejudices and desires onto her, which forces us to question how we fill in these gaps and our own ideas about sex and sexuality.

Wong Kar Wai and 3-D Movies

2011-09-02T09:14:00.001-07:00

The other day, I was riding the subway home from work, when I suddenly thought about In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar Wai's gorgeous 2000 film about forbidden love in 1960s Hong Kong. I don't know what made me think of it, but all of a sudden I felt that I was in a crowded, narrow street, the smell of body sweat and hot noodles assaulting my nostrils, and I marveled at how WKW could make someone who had never stepped foot in Hong Kong experience it so viscerally.

WKW's films -- we'll pretend My Blueberry Nights doesn't exist -- are not just movies; they are experiences. I remember watching Days of Being Wild and feeling the humidity and heat in those lush outdoor shots in the Philippines. I remember feeling the grime in some dark, obscure stairway (or was it hallway) in Fallen Angels. His films can be overwhelming -- an assault of the senses, and on the emotions too -- but I wouldn't have them any other way.

Nowadays, filmmakers rely on 3-D to make audiences believe they are experiencing something. But we don't need things flying at us to make us engaged. I can watch In the Mood for Love and touch the silk of Maggie Cheung's dresses, I can smell the dimly lit hotel room where the two romantic leads meet to write their comic book and end up falling in love, I can taste the noodles they eat -- all without special effects (though Christopher Doyle's rich cinematography is kind of its own special effect it's so amazing).

***

On a related note, I went back and read my original review of WKW's 2046 (his sequel to In the Mood for Love), and wow, I can't remember feeling so passionately about a movie in such a long time. (The one recent thing I've seen that comes close is the first 1.5 seasons of Twin Peaks.) Either I am thoroughly jaded or WKW really is magical.

Celebrities at the Movies

2010-02-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

Today Dante and I went to see some Godard rarities--a potpourri of trailers, interviews and shorts directed by or featuring the great French director--at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. We spotted, unsurprisingly, The New Yorker's Richard Brody, whose excellent book on Godard's life and work I reviewed for Forbes in the audience. His companion: Jason Schwartzman! Before and after the screening, Schwartzman was gabbing enthusiastically, gesticulating madly. I wonder what these two were talking about.

It's funny how we've seen more celebrities at the movies than anywhere else in New York City, which is weird because you think of celebrities going to premiers and fancy events and not just randomly hitting up the cinema for a weekend activity--it seems far too egalitarian an activity for them. It also, in terms of seeing actors and directors, feels a bit like breaking down the fourth wall. These are people you are accustomed to seeing on the screen, in another dimension, I guess, yet here they are on the other side of the screen sitting with you, partaking in the same experience. Trippy, man.

Our first summer in New York, we ran into Ethan Hawke getting popcorn at IFC (he was chatting with the employees and seemed to be a regular). We saw Gabriel Byrne at a screening of Claire's Knee at BAM. We spotted Sofia Coppola near the front of a packed theater for The September Issue at the Sunshine. And we sat in the same row as fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi for Michael Powell's The Red Shoes at Film Forum. Each sighting seemed perfect for each celebrity too: Of course Ethan Hawke would hang out at indie favorite IFC; an intellectual French film seems the perfect fit for Byrne, so thoughtful and brooding and intense and handsome in all his movies; Coppola, possibly the best-dressed women in the movie biz and a long-time muse of designer Marc Jacobs, would naturally have an interest in a documentary about Vogue (she looked so chic too, in a striped boatneck tee and slacks); and the theatrical, stylish, sumptuously colored The Red Shoes could provide Mizrahi with some great inspiration for his equally glamorous, vivid fashion collections.

Some New-ish Movies I've Seen

2009-12-31T16:48:00.000-08:00

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Worthy of Dahl

Where the Wild Things Are: Angsty!

Up in the Air: Totally overrated

A Town Called Panic: Fabulously absurdist

Young Victoria: Pleasantly surprised

Bright Star: Stark and beautiful

David Lynch's Favorite Sandwiches

2009-12-21T16:56:00.000-08:00

Photo by Justin Hoff

So, I met David Lynch when he was in New York for a speaking engagement with the Hudson Society. And we talked a bit. And then he listed his top five favorite sandwiches for me. And then I ended up writing about it on Forbes.com. And, well, the rest is history.

(Btw, that's me on sitting on the far left, with another reporter next to me, David Lynch and David's friend, who is conspicuously checking his Blackberry.)

Edumicated

2009-11-07T14:01:00.001-08:00

Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in "An Education"

This afternoon, Dante and I went to see An Education, which I rather liked. But afterward, as we were walking back to the subway he mentioned that he thought the acting and the screenwriting were good but the directing was too stodgy.

He thought that the stiffness was okay for the parts when the 16-year-old protagonist, Jenny, is at home in her middle-class suburb of London, but that when she gets whisked into a world of concerts and champagne and art auctions by a suave older man (played by Peter Sarsgaard), the filmmaking should have gotten freer. (New York magazine's film critic, David Edelstein, said something similar: "Lone Scherfig’s direction is glum. We’re so clued in to what’s really going on that we never share Jenny’s authentic excitement at being introduced to art, music, and exotic locales.")

I agree that the direction is rather conventional, but it didn't in any way detract from my enjoyment of the film. Of course, though I never had an affair with an older man and grew up in a much different time and place, I was quite similar--in interests and aspirations--to Jenny when I was a teenager (I even played a string instrument and shared her love of existentialists; I am still obsessed with French culture), so perhaps Jenny's thrill at being a part of this life of style and sophistication was just naturally more palpable to me than to Edelstein or my boyfriend. As far as the direction goes, I think it serviced the narrative just fine, which is strange since I generally like more formalism in my movies. But I guess sometimes having a story is enough.

*Interestingly, I actually reviewed Lone Scherfig's last movie Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself for my college paper here. Warning: I wrote this as an undergrad; I think that's all you need to know.

Questions

2009-09-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves questionnaires! Dante Ciampaglia called my attention to this cinematic equivalent of the famous Proust questionnaire by film critic Didier Peron, which was translated into English by New Yorker writer Richard Brody.

I bite:

The first image?
All those brightly colored umbrellas dancing in the rain from Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The film (or the scene) that traumatized your childhood?
Maleficent from Disney's Sleeping Beauty. She featured prominently in my nightmares for years.

The movie your parents prevented you from seeing?
What didn't they prevent me from seeing? I was particularly crushed when my mom wouldn't let me see the Romeo + Juliet adaptation with Leonardo DiCaprio when I was an adolescent. Moms are, like, so totally cruel.

Your fetish scene:
Lena Olin in a bowler hat.

You’re directing a remake. Which one?
Not really a remake, but I would like to see someone do a really interesting adaptation of Edie Sedgewick's life--something more impressionistic and trippy than the completely mundane Factory Girl (my review here).

What makes you laugh?
The absurd.

Your life becomes a bio-pic. Who plays the role of you? And who directs?
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sofia Coppola

A film that makes you say “Never again!”
Holocaust movies, war movies, movies about the oppressed/marginalized/etc.

The character who most sets you dreaming.
A pair, actually: Jesse and Celine from Before Sunrise

The absolute filmmaker, in your eyes?
Jean-Luc Godard, of course.

The actor or actress you’d like to have been.
Anna Karina

The last film you saw? With whom? How was it?
Family Life. With Dante. It was interesting, but a bit inscrutable and distant.

If you were to adapt a book?
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (with my boyfriend), and Lolita (I know it's been done twice, but I want to do it again).

The craziest thing you’ve seen on the Internet?
A piano-playing cat. OK, not the craziest, but isn't it cute?

If someone called you a cinephile, how would you react?
Psssssssh.

DVD or more-or-less-legal downloading?
DVD, but really, nothing beats the cinema.

The masterpiece that everyone talks to you about but that you’ve never managed to see.
Citizen Kane. Yes. Really.

The last image?
Have to agree with Richard Brody here: Jean Paul Belmondo closing his eyelids with his hand.

Austen at the Disco

2009-09-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

Kate Beckinstale and Chloe Sevigny primping at the Club

The Criterion Collection has released Whit Stillman beautiful and witty 1998 film The Last Days of Disco on DVD. I saw the film for the first time a few weeks ago at a screening at Lincoln Center, following which was a disco dance party, though I was really the only one moving my hips in a room mostly full of film nerds.

Stillman is a wonderful observer and chronicler of society who is unsparing yet sympathetic to, even protective of, his characters. Film Comment's Gavin Smith, in a conversation with the director after a screening of the film at Lincoln Center, compared him to Jane Austen, and I think that is rather astute. In a wonderful recent interview with the Village Voice, Stillman referenced Austen but also F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger and Evelyn Waugh, though Stillman is far kinder than the often acerbic and bitter Waugh.

There is a bit of a This Side of Paradise whiff to Last Days of Disco -- these kids, spoiled and bright, with their Ivy League pedigrees looking for love and trying to find themselves as they are thrust into young adulthood. The passion and earnestness in the film is also in keeping with Fitzgerald's first novel, but it is mixed with -- and even buried under -- a laconic irony and disarming awkwardness (much like many of Austen's funniest scenes). Alice (played by Chloe Sevigny) is the prototypical Austen heroine: independent (but not too rebellious), bookish and serious, yet romantic.

But Alice, in a way, has a much harder time than Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet navigating through her society's social mores. For Elizabeth, elaborate, ridiculous rules are in place that she -- and her suitors -- must abide: the result is awkward, inconvenient, yet pretty safe. Alice, however, is a young woman in a time in which social mores are being completely uprooted and changed, yet there is still some secret, mysterious code in place that she must figure out. It seems so easy (in her view) to everyone but herself. And she watches them with a mixture of envy and (perhaps because of her jealousy) contempt. There is a constant turmoil between who she wants to be -- someone who is confident and who can easily ensnare men (like her domineering roommate, Charlotte) -- and who she really is. It is something all the characters, to an extent, struggle with, except perhaps Charlotte (played by a young Kate Beckinstale), who seems slightly delusional and egomaniacal anyway. It also spurs one of the film's most memorable monologues, in which the womanizing Des (played by Chris Eigeman) muses on the famous Shakespeare phrase "To thine own self be true": "But what if 'thine own self' is not so good?"

The witty repartee -- a wonderful mixture of the high and low-brow -- reminded me of some of my favorite post-graduate-malaise/Gen X films of the '90s, such as Before Sunrise and Kicking and Screaming, albeit about yuppies at the disco rather than slackers hanging around the coffee shop. I wonder if this had something to do with the film's initial lukewarm reception -- that Stillman elevated the much maligned and caricatured disco era and its spoiled, rich and materialistic enthusiasts to, well, something of beauty and profundity.

Two things I wanted to point out from the interview, which I found really illuminating. The first is how Whitman describes his writing process:

The best way I find is to have the characters start to operate and speak and then let them run and conflict and end up one way or another. And I really don't know how things will turn out, generally, in the stories. It's the reverse of what Robert McKee used to say in his course, which is, he used to say you don't want to create story through dialogue ... and the only way I know how to create the characters is to try some scenes with dialogue where they do stuff and say stuff, and then you start getting a sense of the character and what they might do and how they might think, and if you get to the point where they seem to be operating autonomously then it feels much better and much more authentic and worth exploring ...

And it's a slow process, because there're a lot of cul-de-sacs that have to be gotten out of. I think in dialogue, what I find really helpful is trying to sort of tell the truth about things, have the characters tell the truth from their point of view and then, sometimes you make a statement in dialogue and then you realize, "You know, that's not quite true, there are these exceptions, there's this other aspect ..." and then send another character to say that, or they can themselves reconsider what they said. Sometimes by being a little bit tormented by something you wrote that really probably isn't true, you can use that anxiety to come to a solution that helps you in dialogue, helps you in character. And often there's a joke in there, often you can come up with some response that'll be a punchline and you can see them get out of it, get on to something else.

So elegantly put. I love the idea of creating a story through dialogue. That makes sense to me. (There is a third option, I think, though, which is creating a story through a mood or timbre.)

The second is about realism:

I'm explicitly coming to feel that realism is a problem in cinema. It is the criterion for many people's judgment of films, and there's a lot of static about anything that doesn't seem verite to people, or externally verite. And I think ... it's led people a lot of wrong roads, they dismiss some things that are good, and over-value some things that are rather empty because of the infatuation with "the real." That "real" we really get every day, every day we open our eyes. And it is true that the unreal can be artificial in a very bad way, and therefore it makes us appreciate those film that seem real in what they're showing. I've just seen a series of highly-praised very realistic films and ... there's just a feeling of emptiness, of hollowness, there's no humor in them, there's no joy, there's no romance ... I don't think it's true to life because I think we bring those emotions and aesthetic exultation to life as we observe it instead of just having this critically-negative camera covering things...

My boyfriend and I were discussing this quote over our cereals this morning, and we both thought of the current craze for "mumblecore," films about inarticulate 20-somethings trying to figure stuff out. But mostly this quote makes me think, again, of one of my all-time favorite films Before Sunrise (and its companion Before Sunset). That film had a profound impact on me as an adolescent because in it I realized all my dreams and hopes and ideals. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful idealization of romance ever put on screen, yet it still feels true. You can argue that no early 20-somethings are as articulate and profound as Ethan Hawke's and Julie Delphy's characters in Before Sunrise, but that didn't matter, because what they said embodied the frustrations and dreams of young idealistic teens and 20-somethings watching that movie everywhere. They shared our frustrations and struggles, they shares our beliefs and passions, they just expressed them more beautifully than we ever could (and were themselves, of course, impossibly beautiful). In a way, though, that is one of the greatest things about cinema, that it can express ideas and life with more wit and insight and beauty and clarity than we have the luxury or time to.

An Exercise in Mediocrity

2009-08-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

Why do they have to ruin perfectly good books?

Of course this is all speculative--I am not, generally, against adaptations. But with these three on board, how can it not be mediocre?

"Basterdized" History

2009-08-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

A scene from Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"

When I was in fourth and fifth grade, my social studied teacher--who had quite the library of young adult historical fiction in her classroom--leant me the book The Upstairs Room, about two Jewish girls hiding in an attic in German-occupied Holland during World War II. I remember waking up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning and sneaking out of the bedroom I shared with my sisters in order to finish the book in solitude, tears streaming down my face by the end. It was the beginning of a mild Holocaust-literature obsession: Number the Stars, The Journey Back, Letters from Rifka, Anne Frank and, a couple years later, Survival in Auschwitz.

This is, I think, not an uncommon obsession for a certain type of young girl. The amount of young adult Holocaust novel aimed at females (that is, with young female protagonists) is quite staggering, and there were few girls in my (Catholic) fourth grade home room who weren't entranced by Anne Frank. There was--still is--something sacred, horrible and profound in the suffering portrayed in these works about the war and the Holocaust. I think most girls--myself included--gravitated toward the ones of Jews in hiding because while they reminded us of the terrible atrocities conducted by human beings, they also demonstrated the other human extraordinary capacity for kindness and bravery--I always liked The Upstairs Room best because those girls survived; there was a happy--but not naive or untruthful--ending.

But something about Quentin Tarantino's (also, I guess, happy) revisionist ending of his new revenge World War II flick, Inglourious Basterds [sic], was deeply unsettling to me. (I am not alone.) Still, I was surprised by my bristling response. Tarantino's ultra-violent, clearly fantastical postmodern revisionist pastiche is far less exploitative than, for example, Herman Rosenblat writing a fake Holocaust memoir. At least Tarantino's motivations, if misguided and naive, seemed pure. And part of me wanted to find Tarantino's gleeful, unconventional and pop treatment of the war and particularly of the Nazis refreshing. Richard Brody, on his blog, said, on this point, "If there's a virtue to the ostensibly transgressive aspect of [Tarantino's] pulp-fiction obsessions, it's precisely in his willingness to use despised or downmarket forms to bring up difficult or controversial matters.") Yet the film still felt wrong.

I think maybe this had to do with the film's oscillation between "serious film" and "grindhouse flick." Tarantino has been able to seemlessly meld the two before, as in Pulp Fiction, for example, but this time the two tendencies seem disjointed and jarring. The film isn't straight-up B-movie fun because it poses too many troubling--and interesting--questions (about history, Jewish identity, the power of film, etc.). Yet it doesn't examine these questions in any interesting or meaningful way. The problem isn't that the movie is revisionist or funny or ultra-violent, it's that it is so half-baked that it provides neither the cathartic cinematic escape that it promises nor the gravitas that the subject deserves.

A lot of this also rests on one big problem with Tarantino, made more and more apparent with each of his subsequent films: He wants desperately to be a formalist. The arcane references, the anachronistic music, the jarring voice-overs that take you out of the narrative (there's one part in Inglourious Basterds where Samuel L Jackson, in voice-over explains the flammable qualities of nitrate film), the schlocky over-the-top cartoon violence--all the things that make a Tarantino film a Tarantino film. Ostensibly. The thing is, though, that Tarantino isn't a formalist, he's a storyteller--and, generally, a pretty good one. There's nothing wrong with being a good storyteller, and Tarantino should highlight this gift, rather than obscure it or throw it out the window, as he has in this film. A group of Jewish Nazi hunters who scalp their victims isn't a story--it's a conceit. There was a sliver of a story in Basterds--the one about the Jewish cinema owner in occupied France who seeks vengeance for the death of the rest of her family in the hands of the Nazis--but Tarantino obviously thought cute jokes and postmodern flourishes and bloody beatings and shoot-outs were more important.

Because the Oscars Weren't Bloated Enough...

2009-06-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Academy has expanded its best picture nominations to 10 films. Apparently, this is to attract more viewers, but is lengthening your telecast to, say, four hours from three really the best way to do this?

Mon Chéri!

2009-06-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

Since I am an unabashed lover of trashy period melodramas, I am very excited for Chéri, Stephen Frears' adaptation of a Colette novel about a courtesan who has an affair with a younger man--the film comes out in New York next week.

There are several reasons why Chéri can't be anything BUT awesome. First, it is based on a Colette novel. Second, it reunites Frears with Michelle Pfeiffer--the two had previously worked together in quite possibly the creme of the trashy-period-melodrama crop, Dangerous Liaisons. Third, the CLOTHES (love Rupert Friend's burgundy velvet jacket and Pfeiffer's high-necked cream lace and silk dress). Fourth, I have a soft spot for Belle Époque France (actually, I am a fan of most periods French).

In summation, this film was basically made for me. Can't wait till next weekend!

Late Films at BAM

2009-06-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

Godard's King Lear; image from BAM's website.

The last film I saw in the theater was Godard's King Lear, part of Brooklyn Academy of Music's late film series and every bit as head-scratching, meta and generally insane as I imagined. I mean, the cast includes Norman Mailer, Molly Ringwald and Woody Allen and the (tenuous) plot involves a descendant of Shakespeare's trying to recreate his lost works (wiped out in some sort of post-apocalyptic future that looks like the present, or, well, the '80s, when the film was made) and stumbles upon a Lear-like mafia don who is trying to divide his "kingdom" among his three daughters, the youngest being Molly Ringwald, with whom he has a vaguely implied incestuous bond. (The incest bond is further explored--and perhaps made more explicit--with footage of Norman Mailer and his own daughter, which Mailer was reportedly none too happy about.) The film is fascinating, if not entirely conceived or fully formed. Like most of Godard's post-New Wave stuff of the '70s and '80s it is sort of like a collage of fragmented ideas and images; like preparatory sketches and notebooks that would ultimately serve as fodder for his masterpiece and complete deconstruction of the history of film, Histoire(s) du cinéma. The film is more an exploration of the difficulties of trying to capture Shakespeare on film in a new way--of course, every Godard film during this period is an exploration of the difficulties of trying to articulate some kind of notion or idea on film--a task that Godard seems to acknowledge as fruitless but that he is utterly obsessed with attempting to unravel anyway.

King Lear is rarely shown, so I was super excited that BAM was showing it, though I thought its classification as a "late film" curious. Much of the films shown truly were examples of directors working at the tail-end of their careers--Eyes Wide Shut and Autumn Tale, for instance--but King Lear represents, I think, a sort-of middle-period film for Godard. The period after his outward rejection of cinema in the late '60s (after Week-End), when he basically just churned out Marxist propagandist films), and before his heralded return to the mainstream (well, relatively speaking) with films like Nouvelle Vague, In Praise of Love and Notre Musique. I would consider these more narrative-driven films his "late-period" films, but perhaps they would not have fit quite so neatly into the wonderful, strange and controversial head trips that characterized BAM's late film series.

Updated: Godard will try his hand again at literary adaptation, this time with Daniel Mendelsohn's book “The Lost.” Richard Brody reports and adds some of his thoughts about King Lear.

2009-04-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

"We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent; in other words, things as they are." --Jean-Luc Godard's "New Wave battle cry", 1959.

French Films at BAM

2009-04-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about living in Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, specifically its cinema. Less crowded and pretentious than Film Forum or even IFC in Manhattan, BAM is the kind of theater that attracts your average movie-goer and hardcore cinephile alike, playing contemporary mainstream fare (Adventureland), buzzy foreign films (Sin Nombre) and repertory programs devoted to everything from Elliot Gould to Arab filmmaker Youssef Chahine. Currently, the cinematek is playing a series of French films that have won the Prix Louis Delluc--the French Oscar. I thought I would spend the next few weeks perhaps living at the theater, but alas too many deadlines have forced me to skip out on lots of films I wanted to see, such as Le Guerre est fin and Diary of a Country Priest. This Saturday, though, I am planning on seeing my first Rohmer, Claire's Knee! The series concludes with 2006's excellent adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's infamous novel Lady Chatterly on Tuesday April 28, which I wrote about here.

Style and Substance

2009-03-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

I had only the vaguest notion of Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1969 film Z before seeing it at Film Forum today: I knew that it was a "political thriller," that it had won the Academy Award for best foreign film, and that--from the still pictures I had seen--I liked the clothes (1960s shifts for the ladies and chunky glasses and skinny ties for the gents).

You may laugh, but the clothes cannot be dismissed: It is partly Z's stylish panache that gives it its electricity, that makes it a nail-biting, elegant thriller rather than just some cautionary political tale, which it easily could have been. We are, after all, dealing with extremist fascist-like governments here. Somehow Z has it both ways: I can't think of a political film that's this much fun yet so harrowing in its portrayal of government corruption and the way it manipulates the mob. It's George Orwell done with the seductiveness of a Jean-Pierre Melville film.

The film opens with a police general giving a lecture on the dangerous ideological "-isms" infecting society as a group of pacifists await the arrival of a charismatic activist--played by a devastatingly handsome Yves Montand--whose life has been threatened and who is expected to deliver a speech at a pacifist meeting and demonstration that evening. Tensions escalate when a group of right-wing extremists show up yelling taunts, throwing punches and wielding clubs--one of which, coming from a punk in the back of a three-wheeled pick-up, strikes the venerated speaker on the head, leaving him critically wounded. Government officials hope to dismiss the whole thing as a drunk-driving accident and leave it at that and hires young, stoic magistrate Jean-Louis Trintignant to quickly close the case.

But turns out the unflappable wunderkind, with his tinted sunglasses and almost square devotion to his work, is a bit too smart for his own good, and he slowly--with the help of a heartthrob, ambiguously leftist photojournalist--begins unraveling a complicated web of government conspiracy and corruption. Costa-Gavras' breakneck editing, the quick, fractured and jarring flashbacks, and Mikis Theodorakis' thumping score give a sense of chaos and paranoia, less the picture appear a little too elegantly executed.

Time has in no way tempered the film's wallop (it celebrates its 40th anniversary this year). Z was inspired by the real-life assassination of Olympic athlete turned pacifist Gregoris Lambrakis in Greece, which shortly after became a military dictatorship--one supported by the United States. The film's rather sober coda--after a gleeful dispatching of those officials and policemen involved in the assassination--feels rather like a slap in the face, a wake-up call after two hours of first-rate entertainment. In a way it dismantles the conventions of this type of thriller--here we are ready to accept the neat, tidy, happy end to the story, when--bam--life intrudes, as a cold epilogue delivered by our dapper photojournalist, who is then replaced by some dispassionate, anonymous woman's voice.

***

On the way home from the theater I read Keith Gessen's Letter from Moscow in The New Yorker about the trial of the men accused of organizing and carrying out the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and I got the chills. I realized then the prescience Costa-Gavras' extraordinary film, and it scared me.

Breadlines and Champagne: Depression-Era Films at Film Forum

2009-02-07T21:03:00.000-08:00

What better way to wallow in our recessionary blues (or escape from them) than with Film Forum's Breadlines and Champagne series, a month's programming of some of the greatest Great Depression-era movies--classic and obscure; socially conscious and extravagant; screwball and pre-Code--along with cartoon shorts, vintage newsreels and, yes, bread.

The series kicked off Friday night with the salty I'm No Angel, starring husky-voiced femme fatale Mae West and a very young Carey Grant (a rather odd romantic pairing). Vintage-tinged jazz group Vince Giordano & His Nighthawks--snazzy in tuxes--played a set beforehand, which had everyone in the theater bopping their heads and tapping their toes. A newsreel from 1933 showed the highlights of that year and included the phrase "Joseph Stalin, Uncle Sam's new friend..." (the same segment about the USSR's and U.S.'s improved relations also included the incredibly obvious yet still hilarious pun "red letter day"). Employees handed out bread to famished cineasts waiting in line before the show (now, if only they had champagne), and--sweetest of all--the whole evening cost only 25 cents (35 for non-members).

While the rest of the films won't be quite as cheap (regular price: $11), practically every night is a double feature--with a rare triple thrown in. And with classics like My Man Godfrey, It Happened One Night and 42nd Street, as well as salacious pre-Code entertainments like Baby Face (starring Barbara Stanwyck) and leftist social-realist parables, such as the sublimely named Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, how can one go wrong?

*Mae West and Carey Grant in I'm No Angel; image from Film Forum website

All Bio, No Soul

2009-01-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on Milk

Biopics and Talking Bugs

2008-09-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

When I first heard of the upcoming movie Howl, about Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's seminal work of the same name, I, of course, thought the worst: that the film industry would desecrate yet another literary work/figure with the biopic treatment.

Yes, I'm jaded; still, my initial balking has given way to at least interest. First is the scope: the film will not focus on Ginsberg's life or the "creation" of Howl, but on the obscenity trial surrounding the controversial poem. This could, of course, easily cross into pedantic, preachy message-movie territory, but I like when biographical films have a more narrow focus, rather than just doing an overview of someone's life, which tend to be reductive and shallow. And the artsy biopic is particularly reductive--Pollack, Frida, and--the worst--Factory Girl. I think I would rather see a courtroom drama than a literary biopic.

Also, a film about censorship and freedom of speech is, regrettably, particularly prescient now; after all, Howl is just the sort of book vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin would likely want removed from her local library's shelves.

I heard about the film shortly after seeing another "Beat" movie, David Cronenberg's imaginative, trippy adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which ended up being part adaptation of the book, part imagined explanation of the book's creation. I read the book in undergrad and actually remember very little, save for the protagonist being an exterminator and a passage involving a dildo named Steely Dan and feeling vaguely queasy throughout. So I don't know how much of the film was taken from the book, but I loved the manic quality of of it, made all the more unnerving with Ornette Coleman's free-form jazz improvisations, and the nonchalant absurdity of shooting up bug powder to get a thrill or having conversations with giant talking vaginal bugs who double as typewriters. The film is in this happy limbo of reality and absurdity until about the last 20 minutes, when a tidy explanation is given for all the talking bugs and secret government missions and made-up foreign cities inhabited by homosexuals. It seemed at odds with the rest of the film, which is brilliant--and it seemed unnecessary; with some thought and analysis we might have concluded that, yes, this was a film largely about the writing of Naked Lunch--a book, by the way, that also underwent an obscenity trial--rather than a straight-up adaptation. (The biggest clues are the friends of the exterminator--a hunky athletic type in flannels who seduces the protagonist's wife (Jack Kerouac) and a bespectacled, gangly poet (Ginsberg).) Or maybe we would have just taken it for a crazy, sci-fi movie about talking bugs. Ah well, ignorance is bliss, I guess.

Shameless Self-Promotion

2008-08-14T16:07:00.001-07:00

If you haven't seen on my other blog, Gen X is taking over the world!!! (And that's a good thing.)

My Q&A with Lisa Chamberlain

Review of Slackonomics

"Drizzly. Dense mist in evening. Yellow moon."

2008-08-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

So, what did George Orwell think about when not penning literary masterpieces?

Apparently, the weather.

Bodice-Ripper, Maybe

2008-07-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

My one guilty pleasure: trashy, sensationalistic period films (sometimes known as bodice-rippers).

This is why I am so excited for Brideshead Revisted. The trailer looks so ridiculous, so intricately yet erratically plotted, so filled with latent homosexuality, so puritanically smutty (you know, there's enough sex to satisfy our prurient selves, but the sex--and the money, power, material wealth, etc.--always leads to destruction of the soul, which makes it then easy to rationalize our enjoyment of the film). Nevermind that it probably does the book (by Evelyn Waugh) a great disservice; resistance is futile, I must see this film:

However, when trolling about the Internet looking for a release date I came across some rather distressing news. The film is PG-13. Yes, PG-13. Perhaps this isn't the Dangerous Liaisons the trailer makes it out to be. (Why does everything have to be watered down so it can receive a PG-13 rating? It seems particularly silly in this case since the film clearly isn't being marketed to a young demographic, nor can I imagine many middle- and high-school girls clamoring to see an adaptation of a novel they have probably never heard of (this isn't Jane Austen or Wuthering Heights)--unless that girl was me circa 1998; I definitely would have begged my parents to let me see this.)

Anyway, great literary adaptation; delicious guilty pleasure; watered down period melodrama? We shall see.

A Haiku About Park Slope

2008-06-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

So many mopeds
But nobody riding them
The new "It" item?

Everything Is Godard

2008-06-06T11:09:00.001-07:00

While neglecting my blog, I've been reading about Godard, watching Godard, talking about Godard, breathing Godard... And wrote a review about a book about Godard.

Once More, With Feeling, Or Not

2008-04-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights

Every time I watch Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's (arguable) masterpiece In the Mood for Love, I get a ravenous desire for cheap Asian noodles. Not a craving, mind you--a ravenous desire that if not satiated will last days, days I spend in anguish just thinking about, obsessing over, how I will get my hands on some MSG-laden noodles. I'm like a junkie in need of a fix. Experience has taught me to watch that film with some good take-out--or at least a cup of ramen.

This is strange since I can't remember that many shots of really appetizing-looking food in the film at all (for food porn, see The Vertical Ray of the Sun or Big Night or Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.) That's how transportive Wong Kar-Wai's filmmaking is; he films an encounter at the noodle stand, and I feel like I'm there: pushing through the crowd, yelling to have my voice heard, feeling the heat from the steaming pots of noodles, smelling them. If I had to pick one word to describe his filmmaking, it would be "sensual."

However, "sensual" is not a word I would ascribe to WKW's latest (and first English language) film My Blueberry Nights. Case in point: Despite all the money shots of gooey vanilla ice cream melting in blueberry pie, I not once craved--nor got a sensation of--blueberry pie. I just thought, "ice cream melting in pie." I also thought of how sexual the shot was, but that thought was unaccompanied by desire or feeling as well. There was no depth. The film wasn't an experience so much as a bunch of pretty pictures tenuously held together by a threadbare plot. (This coming from someone who, generally, likes her plots threadbare.)

Actually, compared with most WKW films, My Blueberry Nights has a fairly concrete and identifiable plot. (Can you imagine trying to write plot summaries for his other films? In the Mood: Two cuckolds become friends, are bereft about their marriages, fall in love, maybe. Chungking Express: a fast-food-stand server pines for a regular who is pining for his ex; meanwhile, another regular pines for his ex but finds a diversion in a smuggler with a blond wig. Ashes of Time: martial arts masters do very little fighting, a lot of pining for one another. Fallen Angels: who even knows.)

Here's Blueberry Nights: a young woman (played by a wooden Norah Jones), spurned by her lover, finds solace in the company of a café owner (a really appealing Jude Law) and then goes on a cross-country road trip to forget about her ex-lover, where she meets many "colorful" (read: stock) characters. I miss all the pining.

Jude Law in the classic Tony Leung role

I'm not being glib. One of the problems with Blueberry Nights is a lack of urgency that characterizes WKW's other films. That feeling that if you don't get the girl, your life is not worth living. To a non-romantic, or to anyone who hasn't seen a WKW film, this sounds a bit ridiculous and melodramatic, and it is, but who hasn't felt this way at some point? And every time I see a WKW movie and am overwhelmed with longing or loneliness or romantic feelings or even hunger, I feel like this is why I watch films. His films aren't just meditations on these things, they are these things. It’s the whole experience thing I discussed in my last post.

So, why does Blueberry Nights lack this urgency? First, there's Norah Jones (who isn't a cringe-inducing actress, but just has no presence); she doesn't so much act as react, though that's partly the script's fault. She's supposed to be a heartbroken mess, but she just seems like a perfectly well-adjusted girl who just was dumped by a guy whom she wasn't that crazy about to begin with but was accustomed to and so thus feels a little lost. This is not the stuff of WKW movies: No ambivalence allowed.

Jude Law's character, I thought, should have been the protagonist. A man with an interesting, not quite mysterious but maybe a little intriguingly hazy or murky past, who is pining for a lost girl who comes to his café and cries about her broken heart while gorging on his leftover blueberry pies. Law's is the classic Tony Leung part--he's also as dreamy as Leung. And he seems real, unlike Natalie Portman's character (a spitfire gambler) or Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn's fraught couple with a penchant for drinking and fighting.

Another reason why I think Law should have been the protagonist is because WKW doesn't understand women, completely. This isn't a bad thing; WKW does not usually pretend to understand women but tends to look at them--and film them--with a mixture of bemusement and awe. (The one exception I can think of is Faye Wong's character in Chungking Express, who plays a lovesick fast-food worker, and who is more empathetic than mysterious and seductive.)

Repression is also missing. One of the characteristics that make WKW's films so unbearably (in a good way) heartbreaking is the compulsion--or expectation--to repress one's desires or feelings. For this reason, his films aren't very talky, and this has made him find other ways to convey characters' thoughts and motivations. Here, though, everything is much more open (I don't know if this is merely the way he views American culture, in contrast with his own). People just talk, talk, talk, but there is no subtlety, and, because characters can just talk, talk, talk, there is not this urgency and longing to reach out to someone, this hunger for human connection that drives my favorite WKW characters to despair. I'm not saying I want characters to be despondent--I love, for example, Chungking Express, which is this sweet romance between lonely, inarticulate, crazy romantics--there's just no sense of struggle, of self-doubt, of repression in Norah Jones "journey," and there's really no obstacle keeping her from her destined love.

Of course, there are a bunch of other problems with Blueberry Nights: The camera work is jarring without serving the themes or narrative; the dialogue is, often, awkward; I miss WKW's regular cinematographer, Chris Doyle. But I could take or leave those. The romance--gut-wrenching, heartbreaking romance--is what I can't live without.

It's Not a Puzzle

2008-04-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Before I get to the fun stuff--ie. the film stuff--I want to take the time for some shameless self-promotion. (Those who read my other blog have surely seen it by now.) I got a piece published in Forbes.com about perfumes. It's a fun little trifle. I knew almost nothing about (and, in fact, for many years, hated) perfumes. But I found the topic quite fascinating and now have the urge to begin--maybe--wearing one or two. We'll see.

Okay, now that you have read--or bookmarked, or chosen to ignore--my piece, we can proceed.

I guess I'll start with a question: Why do we watch films?

I have been asking myself this question because lately I feel like I watch films for completely different reasons than most people do.

I was thinking about this after watching Last Year at Marienbad, a 1960s French film by Alain Resnais (who had previously directed Hiroshima, Mon Amour). Last Year at Marienbad is notorious for being "difficult," impenetrable, divisive. People who love Marienbad say something like "I've watched Last Year at Marienbad X amount of times, and I still have no idea what happened last year at Marienbad" (as if obtusity gave the film some sort of artistic cred); people who hate Marienbad say they hate it because they have "no idea what it's about" (as in, they think after seeing it, "What the hell just happened?").

Somehow, I think, both are missing the point.

First, I don't think the film is meant to be a puzzle. I think it's a meditation on the past, memory, how memory distorts reality, idealism, madness, obsession -- with some social commentary thrown into the mix (those 1960s French auteurs loved to poke fun at the bourgeoisie).

Basic summary: An unidentified man (X) meets an unidentified woman (A) at a summer retreat in Marienbad and claims that they have met before (last year). The woman insists she has never seen him before in her life, and he tells her again and again, upon every subsequent meeting, the details of their affair last year and how they had promised to meet again this year at the same place. Of course the story goes through several variations and permutations, flashbacks and the present are conflated, and there's not so much conversation as there are cryptic utterances and stream-of-conscious rambling. (Sounds like a film snob's wet dream and various other people's movie hell, doesn't it?)

Since the events of the story keep changing with everyone of X's re-tellings, it's clear that X, himself, doesn't really know what happened. He's played a romanticized version in his head so many times in the past year, slightly tweaking details, that he has obliterated the truth. (There's an interesting moment where he's telling A of their romantic rendezvous in her bedroom, and then, entirely unprovoked, as if trying to convince himself, he insists that it wasn't rape, that she was willing, that the act was pure.)

Perhaps the only one who knows what actually happened is A, but she remains tight-lipped, she's not telling anyone--not X (the narrator), not the director, not us.

But it's not the fact that we will never know the plot that makes Marienbad an interesting film--it's its handling of tangible themes that make it interesting, and, ultimately, relateable. It's also its sumptuous cinematography, its gorgeous shot compositions, its eerie mood and the impossibly beautiful Delphine Seyrig (who plays A)--and her covetable wardrobe, designed by Coco Chanel--that makes us watch, that makes us appreciate the beautiful artificiality that somehow can convey truths of cinema.

Which brings me to my second point, why do people feel the need to understand a film in order to like it? I don't know what happened last year at Marienbad, but that doesn't prohibit me from enjoying what is transpiring before me on the screen. The same goes for, say, Mulholland Dr.. I hate when I tell people I liked that film and they respond with "Well, can you explain it to me?" or "Did you understand it?" Can we ever really truly understand film--or any work of art--anyway? I mean, we can't know what the director intended when he or she made a specific film. We can only interpret, experience. And interpreting is different than explaining. Who wants to have art explained anyway? Isn't it much more fun to ruminate and discuss and argue anyway?

And isn't it much more fun to experience? To let the images move you, to yield to them and let them take you on some sort of little journey? I think solving the puzzle of a film like Marienbad--or trying to solve the puzzle--is missing out on the film itself.

The Moment You've All Been Waiting For: Oscar Recap!!!

2008-02-26T19:51:00.001-08:00

I spent Sunday evening watching the Oscars with my computer on my lap and discussing the mostly mind-numbingly boring telecast via gchat. "I'm so glad gchat exists," I wrote to my friend Chris, "otherwise I don't think I could handle watching this by myself." This was early in the evening too--actually during the soul-crushingly vapid red carpet promenade. ("I'm really disappointed that there's Hannah Montana synergy happening," was what Chris had to say about that.)

Have you ever seen anyone more obsequious than Regis? I never thought I'd say this, but I think I miss Joan Rivers.

Though, WHY WAS MICKEY ROONEY THERE? AND HOW IS HE STILL ALIVE? These were the burning questions I wanted my red carpet telecast to answer! (Chris decided that was not actually Mickey Rooney, but a robot). Instead we got Regis asking random high school kids whether they were excited to see Hannah Montana (by the way, not only did she get to go to the Oscars, but she got to wear Valentino--life is so unfair) and calling Javier Bardem Xavier. Stay classy, Rege.

Speaking of Javier Bardem, who won Best Supporting Actor Sunday night (surprise, surprise), I love how he didn't bother to shave. Instead of looking slovenly, he merely made everyone else look overly vain and pretentious.

My vote for best-dressed: Best Actress winner Marion Cotillard, who wore a white, witty Gaultier mermaid dress that transcended the usual fishtail dresses you see on the Red Carpet by being covered in what looked like actual fish scales. Very high fashion. Tilda Swinton shocked everyone by eschewing makeup and wearing a slinky, almost wet-looking, black one-sleeved Lanvin dress. She looked a little Bowie, a little crazy, and I loved her for it. Cate Blanchett looked radiant and bohemian in purple Dries Van Noten. But everyone else? Zzzzzzzz... (Oh, except for Daniel Day Lewis and his wife Rebecca Miller, who were delightfully eccentric: DDL with his foppish hair and brown suede shoes and Miller with her black-lace puffy Lacroix gown with zebra-print shoes: they were like a less deranged Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter.)

As for the award ceremony itself. I can't tell you how many times I typed variations of "This is so boring" to either Chris or my boyfriend. So predictable. Only surprises:

1. Costume: I thought either Atonement or Sweeney Todd would win, though Chris was not surprised ("Can you make things that look old and European? Here's your Oscar!" was what he said about that). My boyfriend astutely noted that the bespectacled winner, wearing a calico dress, was Diablo Cody 20 years from now.

2. Cinematography: Thought the revered Roger Deakins would take this for No Country for Old Men (he has never won an Oscar before), but I thought winner There Will Be Blood was quite worthy. God, was that film gorgeous!

3. Supporting Actress: There wasn't really a clear front-runner here, but I was thrilled Tilda won. And she had the best acceptance speech of the night--waxing poetic on the golden statue's buttocks.

The montages were especially lame this year. I mean, one was scored to "My Heart Will Go On." Unironically, of course.

Other questions: Why did Owen Wilson feel the needs to translate "Les Mozart des Pickpockets" into English? Was that a typewriter Sarah Polley was typing on in the footage for best adapted screenplay? ("She has final draft on a macbook pro. has to," Chris said.) Where did all those beefcake construction workers come from (Chris: "My dreams"), and didn't that second (out of three!) Enchanted song sound exactly like "Under the Sea"? Were the Coen Bros. stoned? Is the From Here to Eternity just one scene? (Chris: "It's just 90 minutes of kissing on a beach.") Why does Nicole Kidman look skinnier now that she's pregnant? (Though, loved her diamonds!) Chris decided it was an implosive baby. Will we ever be able to see "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go"? Pretty please.

Some Thoughts On The Oscars

2008-02-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

My two favorite days of the year are Halloween and Oscar Night. Ridiculous, I know, particularly in the case of the latter. I have gone on various diatribes against the Academy Awards and have dismissed them as merely being a popularity contest. Still, there's some sort of voyeuristic pleasure I get from watching all these glamorous people all dolled up and reveling in some crass, in-your-face, old fashioned partying and glitz. It's so very Hollywood. Also, much of the pleasure that comes from watching the Academy Awards (preferably with friends -- and ballots! -- and lots of wine!) is the griping or sometimes passionate arguments that are sure to ensue afterwards. For this reason, I was really hoping the writer's strike would be over by Oscar night. But -- because I just love film as an art form as well -- I was also kinda hoping it wasn't resolved. I feel like the Oscars isn't really a celebration of film at all. A.O. Scott articulated these thoughts in his story on the Oscars in today's NYT:

I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I found myself hoping that the strike would shut the Academy Awards down; that for once, in a year of such cinematic bounty and variety, appreciation for the best movies could be liberated from the pomp and tedium of Hollywood spectacle.

Oh, Tony. Will you be my friend?

I am trying to get excited about the awards tonight, but, honestly, I don't even know if I'm going to watch. My apathy is due greatly to not having a party to attend or host. Seriously, what fun is the red carpet posing without the snarky commentary? What fun are the awards without a ballot and prizes? Plus, I think Juno might win, and we all know how I feel about that.

Juno: The Ultimate Male Fantasy

2008-02-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

Aren't my sunglasses, like, so ironic? Fox Searchlight Pictures

This blog is slowly becoming entirely devoted to one specific film: the extremely divisive family-friendly hipster pseudo-indie film about teen pregnancy Juno. (I promise I will change that eventually, but now is not the time.)

I realize that much of the Juno hate (mine included) is intensified by, and perhaps even rooted in, the idea of it being undeserving of lavish praise--or of its various Oscar noms. (I wrote about this specific type of hate -- which sometimes spins off to a backlash phenomenon -- about the critics who love to hate über-hip designer Marc Jacobs on my other blog.) Perhaps if Juno were a small film that got mediocre or tepid reviews, that few people saw, and that went about its innocuous, quiet way, we would not devote screeds to its unworthiness and awful screenplay. (Yes, there are screeds.) A recent Entertainment Weekly cover story on the film had studio people saying we should expect to see many more films with strong teenage film characters now, as though Juno were the first movie EVER made about a "smart," "different," adolescent girl--to which I respond: Heathers, Ghost World, Saved (also, incidentally, about teen pregnancy), and even, I would argue, Legally Blonde, which has a protagonist who is as much of an outsider (and is empowered by her outsider status) at Harvard Law as Juno is in her suburban teenage wasteland. The blog fourfour has an excellent, smart response to the EW article, which asserts that Juno is better than its forebears, because "those characters [in Heathers and Ghost World] were more weirdos than antiheroes. They were marginalized by their difference, whereas Juno is empowered by hers." Fourfour responds:

[A]ren't Ghost World's Enid and Rebecca empowered by being marginalized? Isn't a major theme in that movie how being an outcast gives you a great vantage point from which to view society? Ghost World is, after all, fundamentally a movie about the great American pastime that is shit-talking. I'm not sure how Heathers' Veronica isn't ultimately empowered either, since she escapes her clique without, you know, dying. In fact, I'd argue that what makes those teen-girl characters so awesome is their struggle with being marginalized and empowered. It's part of the whole process of uncertainty that defines the teenage years of so many people in this country. These characters are girls, not superheroes.

I would like to take this even further: Juno's message of girl-power through succumbing to motherhood and getting the guy is admirable but, ultimately, rather faulty and retrograde. Winona's character in Heathers rejects the guy, rejects the popular clique, saves school from burning down, and becomes her own person. The last scene shows her emerging victorious from the flames and asking a wheelchair-bound girl if she wants to ditch prom and hang out and watch movies instead. I mean, come on, that is BADASS. (This is why I wanted to be Winona Ryder at a certain period in my life.) How is that final scene not empowering? Beats me.

I don't want to devalue the suffering and the bravery required to go through an adolescent pregnancy--and I think the experience could lead to empowerment. But the sugar-coated world of the film doesn't lead to that. Instead, we have the man's (or society's) version of the idealized female: the girl who realizes that her purpose really is to reproduce and who gets fulfillment through having a baby and finding a man. Typical.

(Still to come: Juno and its references (in response to your comment from my last post, Chris).)

More on Juno, Pregnancy Films

2008-02-02T16:38:00.000-08:00

From Juno; Fox Searchlight Pictures

First, Manohla Dargis, then David Edelstein. Now, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman criticizes Juno. Hmm... could this be the beginning of a Juno backlash. (I hope so!!!!) Also, Sasha Frere-Jones hates it too, as do some other people. (We are few, but we are mighty.)

Back to Hoberman: he has quite an insightful reading of recent American pregnancy comedies (Juno, Knocked Up, Waitress) and compares them with the Romanian pregnancy/abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palm d'or at Cannes last year. A film using an unwanted pregnancy for comedic fodder is odd enough, but three films doing so in the same year is somewhat disturbing. Perhaps the filmmakers/screenwriters can see comedy in the situations because they -- and their pregnant protagonists -- are middle-class and white. Money, religion, class, struggle, the judgment of society, the damage to their futures: these are not the primary concerns of these characters. The issue of unwanted pregnancy is significantly more complicated for a woman who does not have the money to raise a child OR to have an abortion -- or someone who lives in a totalitarian state that has banned abortions, as in 4 Months. (As Hoberman writes: "Had the protagonists been poor, black, illegal, or Jamie Lynn Spears, the movies necessarily would have been more serious and scarcely as much fun.")

Hoberman doesn't slam these films for their being pro-life (a criticism of several critics of Knocked Up), but for not allowing their protagonists a choice:

Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno are proudly fantastic and a priori pro-life; their female protagonists have no choice other than to bring their pregnancies to term. Obviously, these movies could not exist if their preg protags elected to have abortions. What's more crucial is the fact that the Knockee, the Waitress, and even the hyper-articulate 15-year-old hipster improbably named Juno are unable to express why they feel obliged to give birth to unplanned and unwanted babies. They have no choice and they have no say. It is simply their fate.

...

There can be no female agency in Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno -- not because they are comedies, but because, in each scenario, unwanted pregnancy is the joke played (by God?) on the female lead. As the most successful of the preg protags, she who is Knocked Up is necessarily the most smacked down -- the glass ceiling turns out to be Alison's own uterus. Jenna and Juno are less formidable, but unexpected fertility mocks their dreams of autonomy. All three are taught their place by their own bodies—and what's more, they learn to like it.

I do agree that the "choices" to have the babies in these films are overly simplistic and not fully developed (I mean, I would imagine even a devout Catholic who got pregnant outside of wedlock would struggle with the choice of whether to keep the baby or not.) One thing that I have found problematic (and, frankly, so bourgeoise) about other critics' dismissals of KU is the argument that no woman in her right-mind with a good job would have that baby. Well, there are plenty of reasons to choose to have a baby; the problem with these narratives is not that the women go ahead with their pregnancies, it's that they don't have free will, which Hoberman acknowledges:

If Knocked Up's Alison were a devout (or even lapsed) Catholic in addition to being a glamorous newsreader, if Waitress's guilt-ridden Jenna imagined that a child would improve her disastrous marriage, if little Juno were planning a welfare scam to fund her alt-rock band or simply wanted to gross out the neighbors, these narratives would still function, but now with the added aspect of free will.

Hoberman is critical of all three films, though he seems to have at least enjoyed Knocked Up: "at least cathartic in its humorously blatant misogyny," he writes. He calls Waitress "pathetic," but saves most of his ire for Juno: "Juno, which was written by a woman and has become something of a fetish (albeit mainly among male film critics), is positively creepy."

Juno's knocked-up 15-year-old is at once provocatively precocious and primly pre-sexual. Her pregnancy is a miracle of bad luck—she simultaneously loses her virginity and conceives a baby. It's all but immaculate... Juno decides to have her baby. Not to worry: It won't be for keeps. She will donate the infant to a deserving careerwoman with a deadbeat husband and a stopped biological clock.

Even more than Juno's understanding father and benign stepmom, this act of charity is the movie's essential fantasy. It scarcely seems coincidental that Juno was released in time for Christmas. Pivot its scenario 90 degrees to the right and you have a more spiritual version of Knocked Up. People love clever little Juno because she isn't really a teenager, let alone a person. Juno is an angel.

Wait, she's not a person? Maybe that explains why she says stuff like "I'm forshizz up the spout." Honest to blog!

THANK YOU, DAVID EDELSTEIN!

2008-01-25T21:38:00.000-08:00

...for dissing the Academy Awards AND Juno:

The surprise, of course, is the Best Picture and Director nods for Juno, a movie I’m almost alone in disliking. Of course I knew it would work for younger audiences — I concluded my review, “Brace yourself for the Juno Generation.” But the outpouring of love from every critic surprised me. In several reviews, critics patted themselves on the back for having overcome their impatience with the first twenty minutes, especially the scene in which Juno strides around her local pharmacy ranting that her pregnancy test is positive... What those duped reviewers miss is that the screenwriter, who calls herself “Diablo Cody,” and the slickster director, Jason Reitman, engineered every response. Cody and Reitman introduce the characters crudely: no subtext, everything blurted out. The father and stepmother greet the news of Juno’s pregnancy by lamenting that she’s not into hard drugs and that she wasn’t picked up on a DWI instead. Funny. The father introduces himself to the couple that wants to adopt Juno’s baby by saying, “Thank you for having me and my irresponsible child over to your home.” The prim yuppie (Jennifer Garner) offers her guests Pellegrino or Vitamin Water. On and on, with sitcom banter laboring to be epigrammatical — except that each sequence ends with a switcheroo in which the characters display unexpected (and dramatically improbable) insight. Admittedly, my favorite thing in Juno is one such moment. Dad: “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when.” Juno: “I have no idea what kind of girl I am.” Lovely. But the rest of the time Cody and Reitman flatter the audience for its sensitivity while cramming in pop-culture references (and nonstop alt-pop) to make it feel hip. Even the sexual role reversal — the girl is the tomboy aggressor, the boy the passive femme with the long, skinny legs — is a con.

Why I'll Miss Heath Ledger

2008-01-25T11:17:00.000-08:00

Why has actor Heath Ledger's premature death left me stricken with grief? I don't usually get this way with celebrities, and I feel a bit silly about it, but I'm not alone. Even my mother and boyfriend said they were incredibly shaken and sadden by the news of his death. It's not just because he was a great actor (which he was) and thus a great loss to film. He also had a two-year-old daughter and various film projects in the works. He also seemed like someone who never exuded entitlement or snobbishness because of his fame. He seemed, in photographs and interviews and in his films (where he disappeared into his roles), like a real person. You could see him walking down the street and he actually looked like he belonged: usually celebrities seem incongruous with their surroundings (at least in New York -- perhaps it's different in LA).

This makes the press' obsession and sensationlization of the actor's death particularly despicable. The bold headlines in the New York Post and the Daily News speculating suicide or an affair with Mary Kate Olsen or whatever just make me want to vomit. The actor had pneumonia and was already taking sleeping pills to help with his insomnia: the combination of prescription drugs and illness probably had something to do with his death. It's a profoundly sad, but not an entirely glamorous, way to die. Which is why these publications go out of their way to demean or sensationalize it; they'll sell more papers that way. Sick.

Anyway, A.O. Scott has a beautiful tribute to the actor in The New York Times. Read it and remember Ledger for his haunting work in Brokeback and Monster's Ball and for his infinite charm and charisma in 10 Things I Hate About You. (Seriously.)

To Destroy or Not to Destroy

2008-01-17T18:59:00.000-08:00

Is there an English lit major who does not adore Nabokov? (I have yet to encounter one.) I haven't read Nabokov since my senior year of college, when I took a Nabokov class, which was great but, ultimately, draining; what really did it for me was having to look up seemingly every other word in Ada, or Ardor in the dictionary which was not only annoying (seriously interrupted the flow of the prose) but did no wonders for my self-esteem either. (For the record, I never did finish Ada. Some day. Maybe.) But I loved Lolita (read it 3x -- rare for me)! And Pale Fire! And The Gift!!!! Oh, The Gift...

Anyway, where was I... oh yes. Nabokov. I haven't read Nabokov since my English major days, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. So, when I read that Nabokov's son may or may not burn his father's final, unfinished manuscript, I freaked out a bit. Nabokov expressly gave orders to destroy the manuscript (known as The Original of Laura) upon his death. So the question: should his son, his last surviving heir, grant his father's dying wish or should he do the world a great service and make Laura available to the public?

I hope he picks the latter, because I really want to read it!!!

One Sentence Reviews: Spring Awakening

2008-01-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

There is such a thing as too sincere.

A List

2008-01-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

My year in music...

Superlatives

Favorite Swedish crooner: Jens Lekman
Favorite British crooner: Richard Hawley
Favorite Canadian chanteuse: Feist
Favorite Pakistani/British chanteuse: Natasha Khan aka Bat for Lashes
Favorite French chanteuse: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Favorite folk chanteuse: Marissa Nadler
Favorite indie multi-instrumentalist "wunderkind" who's not Sufjan Stevens: Annie Clark aka St. Vincent
Favorite brash/bratty British pop singer who's not Lily Allen: Kate Nash
Three rappers whose albums/mixtapes I liked better than Kanye West's: Aesop Rock, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne
Favorite new garage band revivalists: Black Lips
Favorite "old" garage rock revivalists: White Stripes

You're so cute, Jens; photo by Emma Svensson

Favorite song about not getting any (man's perspective): No Pussy Blues by Grinderman
Favorite song about not getting any (woman's perspective): Another Weekend Without Makeup by The Long Blondes
Favorite song about New York: Myriad Harbour by The New Pornographers
Favorite song about Paris: Paris Is Burning by St. Vincent
Favorite guilty pleasure song: I'm a Flirt by R. Kelley (not quite "Trapped in the Closet," but its pleasures are more, um, subtle?)
Favorite song that gets the hipsters dancing: D.A.N.C.E. by Justice
Favorite song that gets the rebelz dancing: Boyz by M.I.A.
Favorite song that gets the teeny-boppers dancing: Lip Gloss by Lil Mama
Favorite song about dancing: I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You by Black Kids
Favorite song that kind of freaks me out: When Under Ether by PJ Harvey
Favorite song about loss: Someone Great by LCD Soundsystem
Favorite favorite song: The Underdog by Spoon

St. Vincent photographed by Tod Seelie

Favorite album by a sexually ambiguous violinist/violist: The Magic Position by Patrick Wolf
Favorite album by a band I don't normally like: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer by Of Montreal
Second favorite album by a band I don't normally like: Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective
Third favorite album by a band, er, musician I don't normally like: The Shepard's Dog by Iron & Wine
Favorite album by a reunited band: Beyond by Dinosaur Jr.

The song that really needs no superlative: Umbrella by Rihanna

Favorite Albums (in alpha order)

Bat for Lashes: Fur and Gold
Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity
Feist: The Reminder
Jay-Z: American Gangster
Jens Lekman: Night Falls Over Kortedala
M.I.A.: Kala
Radiohead: In Rainbows
Spoon: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
St. Vincent: Marry Me
Patrick Wolf: The Magic Position

Richard Hawley has cool glasses; Patrick Wolf has a cool jacket

Other favorite music moments

The reissues of Leonard Cohen's first three albums
The reissue of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation
Seeing David Byrne at The Blow concert (I know he's supposedly at every show in New York, but it was still terribly exciting)
The Blow concert
Skipping class to drive to New York to see Bjork

The new wave/post-punk revival fever subsided a bit in 2007. (Finally! I mean, I like New Wave and angular rock just as much as the next child of the 80s, but most of the new stuff was so uninspired.) Instead, we heard bands dabbling in 1960s psychedelic garage rock. The most compelling of these bands (that I've heard) are The Black Lips for their sloppy, raucous, unhinged sound. (Their live shows are the stuff of legend: apparently, vomiting, urination, and nudity are de rigueur.) Bloggers are comparing Finnish four-piece Cats on Fire to The Smiths and Morrissey (the lead singer's voice does recall Morrissey's quivering, fragile baritone), but the Hammond organ on the song "The Smell of an Artist" makes me think of 60s psychedelic group The Zombies. (By the way, I love virtually anything with Hammond organ.) Pittsburgh (holla!) band Black Moth Super Rainbow creates hippie freak-out music so trippy and otherworldly with Moog and ostinato flutes and trance-inducing ennui-ridden vocals that I can't help but wonder if I actually really am on drugs when listening to it. Their label provides this description for the band: "Deep in the woods of western Pennsylvania vocoders hum amongst the flowers and synths bubble under the leaf-strewn ground while flutes whistle in the wind and beats bounce to the soft drizzle of a warm acid rain. As the sun peeks out from between the clouds, the organic aural concoction of Black Moth Super Rainbow starts to glisten above the trees." Far out!

An Introduction

2008-01-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

Hello.

I know. The place looks rather sparse. I just moved here. Well, not entirely. I only partially moved here. But my other home was getting kind of crowded. I know, I should really curb my bad fashion habit, but I can't stop reading and commenting on women's magazines and fashion shows or showing off my new cone-heeled platforms. That's why I needed another place -- to store all my thoughts on music and films and books, which have been piling up and collecting dust since I started working on a masters in fashion journalism and spending my days trolling the style.com archives and reading Roland Barthes and Thorstein Veblen and, um, Vogue.

This space is to be more free-form, random: a film and music journal with maybe some short book reviews thrown in. (I also write book reviews for these guys.) I will continue writing about fashion and the media on my other blog.

Anyway, welcome!