Recently in Movies and Television Category

8: The Mormon Proposition was one of the hotter draws at the 2010 Sunstone film festival this past January. I should know: I showed up at Sundance's Salt Lake City box office well before dawn one morning in the hopes of getting my hands on a day-of-show ticket, and, when that didn't work, queued for over three hours outside the Tower Theatre in the wait-list line. All I got for my efforts was extremely cold feet and a new Facebook friend.

I finally managed to see it, this past Friday, when it opened in theaters across the country. I was at the very first general admission showing in SLC.

There wasn't much about the general contours of the movie that surprised me, largely because I've been paying attention to Mormon anti-gay sentiment since the late 1970s. As a teenager I fell in love with the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and discovered to my surprise that no matter how I worked at it, I really couldn't bring myself to care who he slept with. That was when I started to think that homophobia was just plain weird, and found myself puzzled when others expressed it.

Some of the details of the movie, however, were shocking, and much of it was upsetting--I admit I cried a lot. (I wasn't the only one crying, though.) But the most shocking thing about the whole story is, I think, something the movie misses.

I've got a piece up at Religion Dispatches discussing this shocking omission. I'm not going to link to it, because as I've said, my blog is semi-anonymous, meaning I don't link to my last name. But I hope you'll head on over to RD and check out my essay. It should be easy to find: it's currently the lead story. (Go me!)

So, I watched A Serious Man recently. I started it Thursday and finished it Friday. I liked the first hour.... and then I got irritated, and cut it off for a while. When I came back to it the next day, I was really impatient. What the hell is going on, I wondered? and when is whatever's going on, just going to END?

I admit there were moments along the way I really loved, elements I thought were great. I really liked Michael Stuhlburg, the actor who played Larry Gopnik. I LOVED Mrs. Samsky. I thought Sy Ableman was a wonderfully horrible character. I enjoyed the references to F Troop, which I vaguely remember liking when I was a little girl. I loved when the rabbi started quoting Grace Slick at the end. And there was something about the look of the film that I found quite compelling.

But the end? I had heard that it didn't really have an end, that it just STOPPED. And sure enough, it didn't really have an end; it just stopped. I was so irritated that I cut it off before the credits, which I typically watch.

And then, about ten minutes later, the meaning of the ending hit me, and I just started laughing, because I got it, and because it was perfect. I have been thinking about it all day, remembering the entire movie in a different light, and now I wish I hadn't already sent it back to Netflix so I could watch it again.

If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to read any spoilers, don't click on the "continue reading" link. Instead, just watch this terrific cartoon version of Job:

but if you want the details of the epiphany I had about the end, read on:

A friend posted this on Facebook, and I reposted it there, but I have to share it here. It's SUBLIME. It's PERFECT, one of the best things western civilization has ever produced. We should beam it into outerspace along with a statement affirming that this is one of the finest, most complete representations of our culture.

I mean, it's really funny, so funny that I have to start watching "Extras," the show the clip came from. And will you check out Mr. Bowie!?!!! The man will be 63 on January 8, 2010, and look at him! He's still gorgeous! He still has a fantastic voice and what looks like his own hair! I have long believed that he is the coolest person the 20th century managed to produce, and this reconfirms my opinion. He was Ziggy Stardust, and the Thin White Duke, and the freaky guy in Labyrinth, and he provided the voice for a character based on him on Spongebob, and now he does this! Is it any wonder I worship him? I think it must be completely awesome to be him, and to know him.

Anyway. If you haven't already seen it, watch it. Enjoy. I bet you'll watch it twice, and post it to YOUR facebook page too.

My favorite poem by Robert Hass is "Meditation at Lagunitas," which begins

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

Pretty much.

Friday night I went to the Sunstone Chritsmas party, my first Christmas party of the season, and perhaps my last.... I was also invited to one last night, but I couldn't make it. No other parties are scheduled for the next few weeks except a few celebrations of ME, 'cause, you know, Jesus's birth isn't the only one celebrated in December.

Anyway, there was a conversation about New York Doll, a documentary about Arthur "Killer" Kane, which I wrote about several years ago in an entry that garnered lots of very interesting comments. There were people at the party who had never heard of it, and those of us who had seen it tried to explain what it was about and why someone should watch it. I mentioned what I said in my entry: that when I heard David Johansen sing "Come, Come Ye Saints" I burst into tears and sobbed until I couldn't breathe or sit up.

This struck some of the other people there are strange. "I didn't cry when I heard that hymn," one person said. "Not at all."

"You're still active in the church," I said. "You still get to sing that song as part of a community that values it. It doesn't represent a loss to you."

Loss ebbs and flows. We get over loss to some extent because we have to, and because time, if it doesn't heal all wounds, at least changes them. But our experience of loss starts not with the actual loss, but with our awareness that it WILL happen.

This morning I was busy accomplishing great things when I thought, "Hey! I forgot to watch the latest episode of Dollhouse over the weekend!" Of course I forgot; I'm not really interested, and I've been watching only out of obligation. But I tend to meet my obligations, even to Joss Whedon, so around noon I clicked onto Hulu to catch up on Joss's crappy current project while I ate lunch.

The ep started off with some creepy guy arranging a strange croquet tableau with real women propped up by the sorts of stands used to position mannequins. I figured it was a client of the dollhouse using its "dolls" in the most literal ways: as dolls. I continued to think that even after he used a croquet mallet to bash in the head of one of the women. I continued to think that after we flashed to the dollhouse and there was a discussion of helping some guy who'd ended up in the hospital after being hit by a car, which was what happened to the creepy guy we saw using real women as life-size dolls.

BUT NO! Turns out that the creepy guy was NOT a client of the dollhouse, but the nephew of a stockholder of the dollhouse's parent company! And Creepy Guy's brain scan reveals so clearly that he's a serial killer, that even the amoral, idiotic Topher is unwilling to bring this guy out of a coma.

Remember earlier this year when I was writing indignant screeds about how VILE Dollhouse was? I complained about the names, the stupidity of Topher Brink (the Dollhouse's putative "genius"), the sexualized violence against women that the show trafficked in.

And then the show ended and I forgot about it.

Last weekend I was visiting Hulu, and an ad for Dollhouse popped up--seems Season II has gone and started and I forgot to pay attention to the buildup. But hey, it was the weekend, and I had a sandwich to eat, so I figured, what the hell, I'll watch the first ep of the new season.

And it bored me.

Now, as I have written in relation to True Blood, I can watch something that is JUST boring, but if something is boring on top of being annoying, pretentious, pompous, unbelievable, unrealistic AND really super busy, then I have a hard time watching.

There is so much going on in this stupid show, but not in a good way. Echo is SUCH an amazing presence, according to the show's own mythos, that she can be A) a doll who has to go back to the Dollhouse and get checked up repeatedly, AND B) an undercover federal agent who has an apartment, a life, a partner, and an agenda that involves bringing down a super-duper HOT arms smuggler whose specialty is dirty bombs, and C) so seductive and alluring that in a few short months she convinces said arms smuggler to propose to her and marry her in a lavish ceremony with killer catering and lots of guests? (Aside: Which dolls were used to served as the family and friends of this particular persona? I'd supply the persona's name, but I can't remember it for the life of me, not on top of the other two names Eliza Dushku already has in this show, and besides, the individual personas don't really matter; they just disappear into the TV void.)

Anyway. Adding to the unrealistic, unbelievable nature of the show is the fact that this long-term assignment for Echo is paid for by Agent Ballard, who now works for the Dollhouse. Wow! The Dollhouse must pay its employees well, if they can afford to hire the entire establishment for a massive project.

I should note that there are still people who love this show. The reviewer at Salon thinks it's great. She mentions an exchange from the Season II opener, between the doctor played by Amy Acker (whose name I also can't remember--oh, wait--apparently it's Claire) and head of security Boyd something, and writes glowingly about it:

A few days ago Rebecca left a comment on my post about True Blood that brought me up short: she mentioned that she found the show kinda boring.

Yeah, I thought, she has a point. It is kinda boring. I could tell I was kinda bored because I would get up and walk into the kitchen without pausing the dvd player so I wouldn't miss anything. Occasionally, I would fast forward through something extra tedious.

It just didn't seem like a big deal. In grad school you get really used to reading and watching boring stuff all the way to the end. It got to where if something was merely boring, instead of, say, boring and misogynist, or boring and irrelevant, or boring and riddles with errors of grammar and logic, I was grateful.

Bore me, in other words, just a little bit, and I'll go along for the ride. Bore me AND offend me, and I'm gone.

Which is what happened with True Blood. It moved from being just kinda boring to being kinda boring AND horrifically violent and gory and mean-spirited. All but a few moments of Episode Ten depicted the characters being completely HORRIBLE to each other. I fast-forwarded through more than I ever had before, and at the end, I felt I'd been assaulted. I was heartsick and nauseated, and I needed a bath as much as the characters who ended up drenched in blood--and I mean drenched in blood, having taking a blood shower, with it saturating hair, face, nostrils and clothes.

Here's the thing: I don't like vampires. I'm not interested in stories or movies about vampires. I have, nonetheless, developed a habit of paying attention to shows about women who are in love with vampires, having been sucked (har!) into the genre because Buffy the Vampire Slayer was so good.

I understand that Season II of True Blood starts tonight. If I had HBO I would probably watch it. I'm about half way through Season I on dvd, and I like it well enough to keep going. Before starting the show, I read Dead Until Dark, the first novel in Charlaine Harris's series about southern vampires, also known as the Sookie Stackhouse books.

I admit I paid attention to True Blood only because I felt obligated to do so, given that I write about Buffy and that I'm going to write about the loathsome Twilight series. But it's... interesting. I'm interested. Dead Until Dark was about 50 million times better than Twilight, on every level: better prose, stronger character development, more realistic attraction between the main characters, and WAY more compelling supporting characters. (Though one of the nice things the TV show has done is make those supporting characters even more compelling--I didn't realize how much the story needed more from Tara and Lafayette until I saw more of them.)

True Blood isn't as good as Buffy, at least not so far, but it sure as hell doesn't suck. (Well, OK, it sucks in the vampire way. It doesn't suck in the bad way, of, you know, sucking something besides blood from a jugular vein.) But despite the fact that both shows focus on pretty young blonde human females with supernatural abilities who fall in love with vampires over a century old, they're so different that they're hard to compare.

I started to provide some background and analysis of TB, but also started worrying about spoilers, since I know I have quite a few readers in Europe where the show has yet to air, and besides, if you really want to know about the show, there are websites that already contain more information can I could provide. So I'm just going to make a few non-spoiler observations.

So, the season finale of Dollhouse was Friday night. I watched it. I didn't hate it as much as I hated a lot of the other episodes, but I didn't like it. The characters all remain so repellent, and the smidgen of feminism spouted by Echo ("superior people don't carve up women" or some such thing) is too little late. And Topher continues to be a nasty, horrible, vacuous suck of television screen time.

This guy is supposed to be some technological genius uber-nerd, and he doesn't even practice basic freaked-out geek data safety. If you have really super-duper important data, you don't just back it up; you back it up A BUNCH OF TIMES and you store the backups in different locations, ideally as far away from each other as possible, so that if the one in Saskatchewan is destroyed by an avalanche and the one is LA is stolen during a burglary and a third in a safety deposit box in Chicago destroyed when the building is gutted by fire, you'll still have the fourth backup you stashed at the back of the walk-in safe at your mother's business in rural Arizona. (This is what I did with various drafts of my dissertation, except for the Saskatchewan location--that was too hard to swing.)

Not Topher! He makes one original and one backup, and he leaves them both in the same place. This bit of stupidity makes possible an important plot point--Alpha destroys the original "wedge" that contains Caroline's really identity and steals the backup, which means Caroline could cease to exist if someone just drops (gasp!) a black plastic computer whatsit. But it also means that Topher is an idiot, not a genius.

If you haven't noticed the sexualization of violence against women, you haven't been paying attention. A defense in rape trials is often that the accused was just doing what the victim liked: giving her violent sex. Women, our culture tries to tell us, like it rough.

But the truth is revealed by the fact that in images of women subjected to violent sex, the woman is rarely happy. She's crying. She's terrified. She's pleading and/or fighting for her life. The violence isn't a turn-on for the woman; it's a turn-on for the person or people about to harm her.

And it's a turn-on, apparently, for audiences. And anyone who intentionally and explicitly links sex and violence in order to titillate an audience is not only not a feminist, s/he is a misogynist. I'm talking to YOU, Joss Whedon.

Which brings us to Reason #3 that Dollhouse is Misogynist Bullshit: sex made violent and violence against women made sexy; sex and violence linked so closely you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.