movies

Sex and the City 2

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Allow me to save you $8. Here is the plot of Sex and the City 2: Four privileged white women take a break from relentlessly moaning about their privileged lives to go on an Orientalist fantasy excursion to Abu Dhabi, where they are each assigned a brown servant to wait on them as they maraud through the country, dressed like assholes, exoticizing people, mocking culture, flouting religious custom, and on occasion, “saving” the natives with their American liberation and largess.

SATC was always only about a certain type of woman, despite attempts to make Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte into everywoman. But the friendships between the protagonists felt universal. And as cartoonish as the individual characters could be, I saw pieces of them in the women around me, if not in myself.

Then I got older. So have the characters in SATC, but the franchise’s male creators aren’t quite sure what to do with women over forty. And so they have taken four flawed but generally likable women and made them repugnant.

Charlotte’s chirpy childishness—always a little icky—seems gross coming from a twice-married woman with two children. Carrie’s self-centered flakiness and drama-whoring is exhausting. Samantha and Miranda are unrecognizable—Sam having gone from an independent woman in charge of her sexuality to a desperate caricature fighting to hold on to her youth (Note: Chris Noth, who plays Mr. Big, is two years older than Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha. Interesting that Samantha is portrayed as fading, while Big still gets to be…well…Mr. Big) while Miranda quits her job because the new partner at the firm is a sexist jerk. No fight. She simply gives up, which seems completely out of character.

SATC was never as feminist as it was made out to be, but now it seems as un-empowering and pandering as a those pink “girl” computers by Dell. And when the fearsome foursome arrive in the Middle East, privilege, racism, and ignorance meet in an unholy trifecta. Here is what we learn:

All you need to know about Arab countries, you have already learned in Aladdin. If you have a Jewish married name, do not use it on a trip to Abu Dhabi. In an Arab country, be sure to wear expensive clothing reminiscent of the aforementioned cartoon. (Two words: gold harem pants.) Arab men are either frightening crazy-eyed religious fundamentalists or hot menservants. (By the way, it is not at all creepy to accept the services of said hot, brown menservants, and if one such manservant is gay... jackpot! Two new accessories for the price of one! Refer to him as Paula Abdul.)

No woman ever follows the tenets of Islam by choice; all women who wear abaya or niqab are oppressed and secretly want to be white, wealthy, American women who wear revealing couture. Arab women who are not oppressed may be bellydancers in Western-style nightclubs. It is feminist to travel to Muslim countries and expose yourself, simulate fellatio on a hookah, grab a man’s penis in a restaurant, and possibly have sex on a public beach. If you are trying to communicate in an Arab country and cannot find the right words, saying “lalalalalala” will get your point across.

Now, I am sure there are those who will say that I am thinking too deeply about a movie that is meant to be a bit of fluff. For you, I will share that SATC 2’s problems are not all about the portrayal of women, privilege, race or religion. Before any of those things pricked my nerves, I was already sighing at the films stilted dialogue, awkward group dynamic, hackneyed situations, and corny jokes that beg for a sitcom laugh track. And then there was the spectacle of seeing Liza Minelli performing “Single Ladies.” Yes, Liza with a “z” sings Beyonce with a “B.”

Excerpted from What Tami Said

Written by: Tamara Winfrey Harris, June 4th 2010

Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life and Chance

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Jennifer Baichwal

Zeitgeist Films

What happens to a person whose life is touched by lightning? How does getting struck by lightning—or losing a loved one to lightning—change a person’s world view? Are such events random acts of nature or are certain people destined to be struck by lightning? Questions of fate, destiny, God’s will, and nature’s intention permeate Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life and Chance, a 2008 film directed by Jennifer Baichwal.

Baichwal says the idea behind the film was a simple question: how do people find meaning in randomness? Getting struck by lightning is the “quintessential example of the paradox of being singled out by randomness,” she says in an interview also included on the DVD. So what are different responses to that event? she wondered. “Is it possible to experience something so violent... and not ascribe meaning to it?”

The question, as it turns out, has a lot of different answers.

Getting struck by lightning feels like an act of destiny, intentional, speculates one of the film’s participants, a writer who feels he was forever changed by his close encounter with lightning when he was fourteen. Ultimately, though, he concludes that “there’s no meaning to this. It’s absolutely meaningless. And yet this is the way the world works.”

Every participant in the film has a different interpretation of what lightning means. One suggests that his fascination with lightning, his pursuit of it, allowed him to gain his soul. Another participant says that getting struck by lightning taught him what life was all about. He claims to have died, to have met some spiritual beings who showed him the shame of his past, but who reminded him that he has free will and he can change his life. “Lightning and change go hand in hand,” he says. “And in a single moment, I was changed.” One participant suggests that lightning and thunder indicate Shango’s anger (Shango is a Yoruba god, and likened to Santa Barbara in Santeria); the faithful must provide sacrifices to propitiate him, he suggests. Yet another of the film’s participants feels only grief about her children, who were killed as they knelt and prayed in front of a cross at the top of a mountain in Mexico. Finally, she decides that what God does is for the best. “The Lord doesn’t make mistakes,” she says.

The film’s premise is fascinating, the stories told compelling, and the speculations worth considering. It would have helped to have a narrator linking the scenes and meditations together, instead of a disembodied and disconnected voice occasionally providing some narration. I ached for more information on lightning itself, though Baichwal says that she deliberately avoided the physical and scientific aspects in order to focus on the metaphysical questions. Ultimately, the film feels fragmented and unfinished. But of course, this is another aspect of the film’s artistry. There are no answers to the metaphysical questions in this movie, only speculations. Is it possible to do anything but hypothesize about destiny, fate, nature’s intention, the will of God?

Written by: Jessica Powers, March 8th 2010

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Zadie Smith

Penguin Press

Many readers know literary wunderkind Zadie Smith for her raging success propelled by novels such as White Teeth and The Autograph Man. In Changing My Mind, her first collection of non-fiction, Smith alternates between roles as a cub reporter, movie reviewer, and homage-paying biographer to the stars of the silver screen.

The strength of Smith’s writing is perhaps best evidenced in the difficulty I have selecting only a few of the dazzling essays to highlight. Witty but also incredibly useful for writer types is Smith’s explanation of her own writing process in “That Crafty Feeling,” in which she differentiates between micro-manager and macro-planner novelists. “One Week in Liberia” is the kind of essay that stays stuck in your mind more than one week and forces you to consider how the global economic crisis—let alone everyday poverty—might be affecting people less fortunate than yourself.

Smith’s movie reviews are interesting even if you’ve never seen (or heard of) the films in question. Her ability to tease out the plot's nuances in geopolitical hypertext thrillers like Syriana speaks to her understanding of the world as well as her talent for relaying complex ideas into simple, readable prose. Less interesting—at least to me personally—were her long-winded accolades for film stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo and writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Franz Kafka.

Perhaps most relevant for a life like my own is “Speaking in Tongues,” a lecture-turned-essay about the necessity of shifting between dialects and class identity as you move between numerous worlds. In what Smith dubs “Dream World,” candidates like Barack Obama suddenly make sense to so many of us, those of us who also shape-shift and might be called inauthentic for our cultural or linguistic inconsistencies. Smith explains that these multiple sensibilities have always been cherished in artists, and as the world becomes continually globalized, this is our varied yet collective future.

Changing My Mind is the type of collection that might languish under your pillow or on the bedside table for several weeks—not because it isn’t a page-turner, but because it is so tempting to savor every last sentence.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 13th 2010

Steam

admin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Directed by Kyle Schickner

Wolfe

Steam is not a complicated film, in spite of the pseudo-complicated lives of its characters. It traces the trajectories of three female characters for a short while, seeming to span roughly six months, give or take a season. Laurie (Ally Sheedy), a divorced and bitter single mother; Doris (Ruby Dee), an elderly recent widow; and Elizabeth (Kate Siegel), a college student with a burgeoning lesbian sexual identity are brought together by chance to a sweaty respite: the steam room of their local health club.

Strangers to one another at first, they come to share small pieces of themselves as they bask in the heat, for those moments free to drop their burdens at the door and let their troubles pour out of them with their sweat. They are expunged, cleansed, baptized by the steam. The second time this flat visual metaphor is used, we were tired of it. By the fifteenth time, we were just plain annoyed. Steam from a sewer grate as Laurie shares what may be the first kiss since her divorce; steam from a bubbling pot as Doris prepares dinner for the new man in her life; steam from her cold breath mingling with her date’s lazy cigarette smoke as Elizabeth meets up with Niala (Reshma Shetty) on their first night together. Replace steam with a bottle of wine or a vibrator and Schickner may have been onto something more poetic.

Outside the steam room, we go deeper into each woman’s personal life through rotating vignettes that follow a predictable pattern. First we meet the characters as they are: disempowered and just existing, without agency. Things seem to improve for each for each of them, then quickly become much worse in sync, until each woman comes back around to find herself again at a new equilibrium. Ready to face the next challenge, they will overcome with their newly acquired storybook feminist outlook. The film narrowly imagines what a woman’s “drama” can be like, offering only tropes in the place of true complexity. To follow one character only and really develop her, or to condense the full length into a short piece would have generated the tension Schickner tries to create with overly broad strokes. The film should be driven by its narrative, but this contrived narrative is weak and can’t live up to its own expectations fully.

Steam puts forth some strong messages by way of its women: queer, sex-positive, and age-positive themes that are always welcome and so often lacking from today’s big budget blockbusters. Chelsea Handler holds what’s left of the film together by a thread with her bit supporting role, providing comic relief as the wise-cracking counterpart to Sheedy’s self-deprecating Laurie. Steam is like a sauna, nice at first but if you stay in too long you might start to get prickly and irritated, or just really tired.

Written by: Kelly Moritz, Nic Vetter, October 18th 2009

Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Molly Haskell

Yale University Press

When I was about ten years old, my mother sat me down one Saturday afternoon and said “Sara, today we’re going to watch Gone with the Wind. You just need to see it.” That was over a decade ago, and I’ll never forget that cinematic experience, even if it did just involve sitting on the couch in front of a thirty-two-inch television and eating cherry turnovers with my mom.

I’ve always loved movies, but seeing Scarlet O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) taunt and toy with the people around her and demand what she wants had a profound effect upon my views of womanhood in both cinema and the rest of the world. Gone with the Wind remains, to this day, one of the few films I feel the need to re-visit on a yearly basis. And, despite her flaws, I still look up to Scarlet O’Hara with her green velvet curtain dress and “fiddle-di-dee” mentality.

If you know anything about classic Hollywood and the studio system, you’ve probably heard of the monumentally challenging efforts it took to bring Gone with the Wind to the screen in 1939. Its entire production, with the two year search to find the right Scarlet O’Hara, fifteen different screenwriters, and five different directors, is flat-out legendary. The film never should have worked on any level and yet, somehow, it did and still does for this generation. If adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time, and it continues to be played regularly on television, DVD, theatrical revival circuits, and in the near future, Blu-ray.

In her latest book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, feminist film theorist Molly Haskell succinctly analyzes the history and hubbub of the landmark production as both a movie and a novel. She traces the film’s success, in terms of both box office gross, and at times, cinematic art, back to its three pillar figures: author Margaret Mitchell, producer David O. Selznick, and actress Vivien Leigh. Haskell sorts through their lives and their methods as if she were looking at pictures in a personal scrapbook and re-living the memories. Their towering personalities were the primary contributions to this melting pot of a film that made it work. As a classic film geek and fan of woman’s pictures, my favorite parts of the book dealt with the placement of Scarlet O’Hara as a feminist icon and heroine. Is she or isn’t she? Everyone feels differently.

A significant number of film theory/history books feel mundane because of their intense dedication to evoking every possible fact and foible. Frankly, My Dear, while still intensely dedicated, never feels monotonous or burdensome. Haskell, as a real Southern belle, feels at home in dissecting the step-by-step moments of Gone with the Wind and understanding the flaws and virtues instilled in its pages and celluloid as both a true-blue woman’s picture and racially confused melodrama. She’s as passionate about Gone with the Wind as Scarlet O’Hara is about her beloved Tara. And like Ms. O, Haskell digs deep into what she loves and won’t let go.

Whether you like the film and book or not, I think anyone who’s interested in history or pop culture will find Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited remarkable because of Haskell’s passionate account and for the sheer enjoyment of learning about something bigger than life actually being made for mass consumption. Like Gone with the Wind, I’ll definitely return to Frankly, My Dear on a regular basis and happily place it on my bookshelf right next to my other favorite film books. And if you don’t like that, I don’t give a damn!

Written by: Sara Freeman, May 26th 2009

Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema

admin — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:59:00 +0000

By Antonio Lant, Ingrid Periz

Verso

This hefty anthology is a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in film, history or women’s studies. Substantial at 872 pages, it covers the years 1895 to 1950. The relationship between women and film is complex and fascinating, which explains the length of Red Velvet Seat, and the relationship has gone mostly unexplored, which suggests the book’s importance. Scholars, in particular, will be excited to see so many insightful texts gathered into one volume. Appropriate for curious readers at home—also appropriate as a college textbook, Red Velvet Seat offers something for every taste.

In addition to the body of texts it provides, numerous illustrations are also presented. The illustrations depict movie-related art as well as photographs of the women discussed within the text. Insightful contextualizing introductions are provided for each of the sections. The text cover all aspects of women and film: women as viewers, women as film-makers, women as actors, women as critics, theory, the movie theater as a social scene. Reccurring themes include power and class. Many of the texts ponder film as an artform and speculate about its future. The scope is comprehensive to say the least.

The text includes essays, excerpts from diaries and journals, and excerpts from longer works. The selections are well-chosen and lucid. Many provide a rich sense of the time period during which they were written. Virginia Wolff, Emily Post, and Colette are among the important figures represented.

With a general index and an index of film titles, with biographies and notes, Red Velvet Seat is well put together and will be remarkably useful to film studies scholars as well as more casual film-loving readers.

Written by: Laura-Marie Taylor, February 22nd 2007