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June 21, 2009

Bore vs. Gore

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.

I took the disk out of the dvd player, put it in its Netflix envelope, and sent it off. Then I went to my Netflix queue and deleted the one remaining disk for the season. There are only two episodes left, but I don't want to know what happens in them.

The same thing happened with another tv series I dabbled in recently, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Netflix recommended it, based on my interest in To the Manor Born and Yes, Minister (which I never got around to blogging about), and I thought, what the hell--particularly since the library had it and I could keep the entire show for two weeks, since I had a feeling I wouldn't race through it. I made it through the first season and was interested enough (in a horrified sort of way) in the sexism, racism and general hardcore weirdness of 1970s British television to look past the boringness of the show. Season II was much the same--until, two eps before the season ended, the main character decided that he was going to ruin his life, AND everyone else's in the process, because he was bored.

And I couldn't put up with that. I'd been willing to go along with the sorta boring depiction of his sorta boring life; I didn't feel obligated to destroy the dvd or my tv or anything, just because this guy bored me. So when he decided to engage in wanton destruction, just 'cause he was bored, I took the dvd out of the player, replaced it in the case, and took the whole thing back to the library. I didn't even glance at the third season or the extras. I was done.

I guess that's one reason I could make it through the whole season of Dollhouse: It only annoyed me; it didn't annoy me AND bore me.

It's kinda sad, really. I should have higher standards. I might work on that.

In the meantime, I have the entire first season of Gossip Girl from the library. We'll see how I do with that.

Posted by holly at 7:55 AM | Comments (3)

June 14, 2009

Vampires and the Names of Women Who Love Them

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.

1. It drives me nuts how in the show, Jason Stackhouse always looks SO INCREDIBLY SWEATY AND STRINGY. Everyone else manages to look like they shower and wash their hair from time to time. Not this guy. His lank (but ever so artfully highlighted) hair is always in his face, which itself is slick with moisture. He is so sweaty that he makes Richard Nixon look as cool and dry as Egypt in December. ICK.

2. One of the things I really like about the Sookie Stackhouse books is that the heroine is named Sookie Stackhouse, an interesting, unusual name with some nice hard consonants to balance out the girly sibilants. You realize what a good name it is for an attractive young modern girl who falls in love with an ancient vampire when you compare it to the names of the others of her ilk: Buffy Summers, Bella Swann, Elena Gilbert. (I only learned about this Elena Gilbert person today when I went to tv.com and was confronted by an ad for the Vampire Diaries.)

I admit that when I first started watching True Blood, I confused Sookie Stackhouse with Sookie Sapperstein, the character played by Claire Danes in Igby Goes Down (which I like a lot). Not only are they both blonde 20-somethings, but the WASPs Sookie Sapperstein sleeps with seem pretty vampiric, so the women's sexual proclivities are fairly similar too. Anyway. That's actually an aside.

Ooh.... it just occurs to me that the word "sookie" is as close as you can get to naming someone "suckie," and might be a bad vampire pun.... Oh god, I hope that wasn't intentional. I hope C Harris had something else in mind when she came up with that name.

The name Buffy Summers was intended to be a joke, of course: Joss Whedon thought it was funny that someone supernaturally empowered to kill monsters should have a name as silly as Buffy. there is nothing ironic (or even very thoughtful) about the name Bella Swann: that character is not an ugly duckling; she's a beautiful swan--get it? It's interesting how much the names Buffy and Bella share: B/vowel/double-consonant/vowel(sound); Swann and Summers are pretty similar too.

I don't know much about this Elena Gilbert character; apparently she's a blonde in the novels but they cast a brunette for the tv show. Her first name is very girly and vowely; her last name is thoroughly respectable and at least begins with a nice voiced velar plosive. (That brief introduction to phonetics I had 25 years ago has finally paid off.)

But here's the thing: While Sookie (Suckie?) Stackhouse is a good name for a chick in love with a vampire, we've seen other blondes with supernatural abilities, an unconventional love life and lots of S's (i.e., Samantha Stevens). I'd really like to see a vamp-loving chick named, I don't know, Rhoda Morgenstern, maybe, or Victoria Barkley, or even Willow Rosenberg or Rudy Huxtable. Something with a little more edge and a little less hisss.

I was sitting here imagining really terrible TV names I hope don't come back. Shirley Partridge heads the list... That made me think of Carol Brady, and that made me think of Carrie Bradshaw.... those last two names are almost the same name. OK, I know Candace Bushnell chose "Carrie Bradshaw" because it had the same initials she did, but couldn't she have picked something a little less like one of tv's blandest moms?

Posted by holly at 1:33 PM | Comments (4)

May 11, 2009

Topher Brink Is the Stupidest Genius I've Ever Seen

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.

Posted by holly at 9:46 AM | Comments (3)

April 9, 2009

Reason "Dollhouse" Is Misogynist Bullshit #3: Sex + Violence = ?

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.

There are snippets of this in every episode, but the most explicit and extended is in Ep 2, "Target" the horrible, stupid version of "The Most Dangerous Game" that all sorts of people raved about. Echo is programmed to be an outdoorsy girl so she can accompany hot young thing Richard on a rafting trip. They make it through the rapids, shoot wild (and possibly illegal) game for dinner, have vigorous, energetic sex in a tent, and before the sweat covering their bodies has even cooled, Richard tells Echo that she better get moving because he's only giving her a five-minute head start.

It's totally gross. It's not just that he intends to hunt and kill her, it's that he gets off on horrifying, hurting and confusing a woman he's just had sex with by casually informing her that he intends to hunt and kill her. He makes her vulnerable; he asks for her trust; he tells her he really enjoys being with her; and then he says, essentially, "It's going to be really fun to track and kill you." His goal all along has been to kill her.

That's misogynist. And please don't try to tell me that Joss is being misogynist on purpose, to show that it's wrong. We all know already that it's wrong to kill and hunt another human being. What makes this episode extra misogynist and evil is the way sex is used to heighten the violence, and the way the hunter gets off on the mixture of sex and violence. That is NOT critiqued in this episode; at no point does the show deconstruct what Richard did. And as the ep progresses, Richard continues to talk to Echo like a lover, using endearments, telling her that "his father would have really liked her" and that "she really is the perfect woman."

The fact that she manages to kill him is NOT some sort of feminist victory; it's a necessary conclusion if the show is going to continue and Eliza Dushku is going to keep her job. The good guys never win here, because Echo is not fighting for the good guys; in this case, she is merely fighting someone who is even more sadistic and awful than the people who own her mind and body for a minimum of five years.

The other really, really gross linking of sex and violence is in "Man on the Street," the ep Joss wrote all by himself and is thoroughly proud of. Sierra's handler Hern has been caught forcing Sierra to have sex with him while she's in her "blank-slate" state, a huge violation of trust since Sierra has programmed to trust him completely and to believe he will never harm her. As a result of her programming, she does not resist at all his demand that she let him do what he wants to her. Hern, of course, is relieved of his duties when this is discovered, and beaten up, and assumes he might even be killed for damaging Dollhouse property. And then we get this conversation between Hern and Adelle DeWitt:

DeWitt: Did it make it better, that she didn’t struggle?

Hern: No. It made it easier.

Then the topic moves to Mellie, the woman with whom FBI agent Paul Ballard has been discussing his investigation of the Dollhouse:

DeWitt: I need her killed and it can’t be clean. This is you chance to avoid the attic. You may even consider it something of a promotion. After all, this one will, probably, struggle.

Get it? Killing a woman is a promotion for raping another. Yes! There's a discussion of how Mellie will, probably, struggle, and there is an immediate cut to Mellie moaning and shouting, her head thrown back--oh wait, she's having an orgasm! She's suddenly in bed with Paul! (How did those two fall madly in bed with each other, given that he was so dismissive of her earlier? I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that the writers didn't give a very full treatment of that relationship's development.)

The planning of her violent death and the fact that she will struggle is juxtaposed with her in orgasm. Given that Hern's in trouble for rape, this deliberate sexualization of the impending violence is really, really, really GROSS.

If you don't believe me, if you think I'm making a big deal out of nothing, think how different the scene would have been if the transition had not been from Adelle talking about how Mellie will struggle when being murdered, but to Sierra having her memory wiped yet again, and THEN and only then was there a cut to Mellie and Paul in bed having pillow talk, without the vivid sights and sounds of Mellie's orgasm.

The orgasm is there to make the violence sexy. But it doesn't work. It just makes the sex violent. It doesn't make the depiction we see of of the intersection of sex and violence a feminist study; it makes it hateful misogynist crap.

Now, someone will probably point out that Hern isn't really sent to kill Mellie; he's sent to be killed by Mellie, who is a sleeper active who turns into a ninja killer when she hears the phrase "There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is green.” But the violence goes on for a while before that phrase is uttered. Mellie could have been activated the moment Hern walked in the door. Instead, we get to see her terrified for her life, running, being caught and dragged by her feet. The emphasis is on the fear of this woman, not her power.

Yeah. That's a good way to sum it up. Buffy was about female power; Dollhouse is about female fear--not the eradication of it, but the creation of it, because that's what keeps the series going. That's misogyny--AND bad television.

See Reason #1 here, Reason #2 here, and an overview of the problem with "recreating violence against women isn't misogyny if you're doing it to educate" argument here.

Posted by holly at 1:01 PM | Comments (10)

April 6, 2009

Reason "Dollhouse" Is Misogynist Bullshit #2: Topher Brink

This Casting Alert at E! Online describes Topher, the guy who programs the dolls, as

20s, genius programmer who's articulate, nerdily attractive and blithely amoral. He's responsible for imprinting the Dolls—and making sure they stay unaware of anything. Is fascinated by the science and kind of digging the illegality. Fun to be around but might not be remotely trustworthy.

In this interview at SciFi.com, Joss himself says that Topher "is going to be cute and funny and sexy, he programs them, and he has a very amoral kind of point of view."

And in this interview at Collider.com, he says that "Part of the mandate of the show is to make people nervous. It’s to make them identify with people they don’t like and get into situations that they don’t approve of."

And my reaction is... You're shittin' me, right? You don't REALLY think this guy is cute and funny and sexy, do you? You don't really think that many people are going to sympathize with a nerd who would wipe everyone's mind blank if he had half a chance? 'Cause I sure as hell don't.

I LOATHE this guy, for lots and lots of reasons, and I'm pissed that Caroline didn't scrape his brain like a piece of burnt toast when she had the chance.

The first reason I hate him is, of course, that he's amoral. Maybe I'm weird, but I don't really find that appealing. The second is that he is painfully sexually inhibited, to the point that he is unable to say "erection," preferring, he says, the term "man reaction." The third is that he is a coward, afraid not only of the dark but of any sort of physical pain or discomfort. The fourth is that he's completely immature--his favorite beverage is a juice box.

The fifth is that any humor his character might provide occurs because all those other flaws, which aren't funny, are played for laughs, which aren't forthcoming. He can't carry the comedic weight his role is assigned.

A huge problem--not only with Topher, but with the whole show--is that in most episodes, Topher is about IT as far as comic relief goes. OK, in "Echoes," ep 7, where the memory drug makes people who still have their brains act silly, there's more silliness than just Topher being afraid of the dark or being so uncomfortable with adult sexuality that he relies on childish euphemisms. Otherwise, most of the humor is along the lines of not-blank-slate-doll-Mike making a list of "naturally sweet" foods like "cantaloupe, mangoes, mayonnaise." It's so slight it barely registers, and it doesn't say anything about the character, because the character doesn't really exist.

I really do hate Topher, and I wish he'd go away. Remember how Joss killed Doyle at the end of the ep 9 of Season 1 of Angel, making way for Wesley, who was much less attractive a human being and much less interesting a character than poor dead Doyle? Why can't Topher die and make way for a less amoral, more sympathetic character?

In "Needs," when Caroline/Echo has him at gunpoint and forces him into the chair, I was really hoping the writers would go ahead and let Caroline/Echo imprint her memories and personality over his. So what if it would cause his brain to implode. That would be a good thing! I would love to see Topher a hollow, vacant shell of his former self, wandering around the Dollhouse and cleaning up gross bodily fluids, much like Maggie Walsh at the end of Season 4, after Adam turned her into a zombie--except Topher would have the added burden of trying to integrate Caroline's sensibilities into his own paltry, fucked-up sense of self.

But no, he's still around, programming actives and giving treatments, and, it appears, likely to stay around, because apparently the writers actually think this shit is GOOD and are self-deceived enough to think that thoughtful people will like it too--not just a few loyal fans, but lots of people.

And to demonstrate that I'm not the only person who has problems with Topher, here's some good analysis from a blog called Watching Dollhouse:

is he really the type of person you want taking care of your imprinted mind? Amorality, I’m sure has it’s place in the world, and perhaps someone who has no moral code is best suited to the job, from the point of view of his employers. But surely the ethics behind the science of this operation, requires someone who has morals?

p.s. I acknowledge that my tirade against Topher doesn't constitute a reason Dollhouse is misogynist bullshit so much as a reason it's just bullshit, period. But the fact that it's bullshit, period, makes its misogyny worse as well.

Posted by holly at 7:41 PM | Comments (9)

April 5, 2009

Free Speech, Bad Arguments, and Violence Against Women

Yesterday, after feeling nauseated and violated after seeing another episode of Dollhouse (nauseated and violated is how I feel after watching any episode of Dollhouse), I picked up Heartbreak, Andrea Dworkin's memoir, a gift from a friend that I had somehow managed not to read for a few years.

I read it in two hours, and it was a perfect antidote to Dollhouse, because it also left me nauseated, because it gave me a portrait of someone who was TRULY trying to fight violence against women, and who wasn't using the fact that violence against women existed as an excuse to depict more of it.

Dworkin's work made me remember ways I have been violated, but it didn't replicate the violation and tell me it was edgy entertainment.

After I finished reading it, I did some on-line research, and I found this image, which to me is a pretty damn good analogy for Dollhouse.

In other words, I might have to respect, on both legal and logical grounds, a person's right to produce images depicting the profound degradation, exploitation and torment of women, even if such images make me feel nauseated and violated. But don't expect me to believe that you're significantly different if you're also producing similar images, even if you argue that your agenda is to call attention to the fact that such images are being created in the first place--as if any of us didn't really realize that already, except for people who don't WANT to know. You're still offering as entertainment images of women being sexually exploited. You're still offering as entertainment images of women in fear for their lives. Instead of offering solutions to the problem you claim you're exploring, you've become part of it.

Posted by holly at 7:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 4, 2009

Reason "Dollhouse" Is Misogynist Bullshit #1: The Names

A few weeks ago, Khatani left a comment asking me what I thought of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's new show. Like President Obama waiting to issue a statement until he actually knew what he was talking about, I waited until I'd seen every episode available (2 through 8, and I read detailed synposes of #1) and read quite a few reviews before I issued my statement.

And here it is: I fucking HATE this show. Watching it leaves me shaken and nauseated, not in some "Oh, Joss is so edgy and provocative" way, but in an "this is violent, aggressive misogynist bullshit" way.

Now, I assume that if any fans of the show (including Khatani) read my blog, they'll want reasons. So here's the first one, something small (we'll build to bigger reasons later):

the difference in the names given to male and female "dolls."

Male dolls have names like "Victor" and "Mike."

Female dolls have names like "Echo" and "Sierra" and "November" and "Tango."

Couldn't the writers either give male dolls names like "Narcissus" or "Carson City" or "Arctic" or "Saturday," as goofy and new-agey and contrived as the names the female dolls have, something that shows their contrived status? Or else give the female dolls unexceptional, familiar names like "Debbie" and "Patricia" and "Lois," so that everything seems even more like a 1950s kindergarten class on qualudes, except with yoga and co-ed showers?

Consistency, people! Gender parity! Gestures that show you've thought really carefully about the issues you claim to be exploring! Not just lazy, easy repetition of all the worst ways women are exploited in our society, with the claim that doing so is some edgy, hip exploration of identity!

There will be additional installments of "Reasons 'Dollhouse' Is Misogynist Bullshit," both because there are many, MANY reasons to cite, and because sometimes I'm committed to showing the flaws in something I've invested strongly in, like the Mormon church or the feminist ideology of Joss Whedon.

As Joss himself acknowledges in this interview, "depending on how it is handled, the show could end up either being 'A fight for her identity or just a misogynist fantasy.'"

I want to demonstrate why this show is not "JUST a misogynist fantasy," but a really creepy, horrible, damaging one, unworthy of the creator of Buffy. I hope it gets canceled, ASAP.

ICK.

Posted by holly at 11:03 AM | Comments (18)

October 25, 2008

In Case You Were Too Lazy

I was totally weirded out by most of the "Hitler memes" mentioned in the NY Times story on people adding new subtitles to the freakout scene in Downfall.

As I've mentioned, I respected ("liked" isn't the right word) the movie and thought it did a good job of showing what monsters these people were. So I felt strange watching parodies where attitudes that would not have been Hitler's, but were instead other people's, were attributed to him. Whereas in one single parody, the very last one mentioned (and you have to do some searching to find it), Hitler remains Hitler, and is concerned about his reputation as Hitler. That one made me laugh.

I've embedded it below, in case you were too lazy to follow all the links yourself. Watch it now, before the company that made the original movie has it removed from the internet for copyright violation.

Adolf Hitler Is A Meme - Watch more free videos

Posted by holly at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

Watering the Planet on Earth Day

In recognition of Earth Day (I started to write, "In celebration of Earth Day," but it doesn't seem right to "celebrate" Earth Day when we're doing such a shitty job of caring for the planet), I'm providing links to a website where you can check your water footprint, which I learned about thanks to this news story.

No one with a brain will be surprised to be told that the US has the largest water footprint in the world--we use more of all the other resources in the world, so why should water be any different? But what makes me crazy is the amount of water we waste in the most careless and irresponsible of ways.

For instance, the movie Michael Clayton is a case in point. Now, I loved this movie; I thought it was just about perfect in terms of its storytelling, and although I wondered for the first 90 minutes why Tilda Swinton won an Oscar for her performance given how little screen time she had, in the last 15 minutes I totally figured it out. But I was really annoyed at all the water just left running in this movie.

For instance, while Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is waiting to hear the results of a very unpleasant job she's just ordered done, she sits in a stall in some bathroom, and leaves the water running full blast in a sink.... because? Because it masks the sound of her sweating? It makes no sense. People can sit in bathroom stalls and avoid detection easily enough if they want to; why did she need to run the water? Or when Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkerson) wants to make it seem like he's still in his hotel room, he just leaves the shower running--and I bet the hot as well as cold water was on. But why? He could have just turned on the television.

I don't understand Americans' propensity for letting things we actually need simply run down the drain.

When I went to Matthew's Belgian wedding last April, I initially had trouble figuring out how to work the lights in the various hotel rooms I stayed in. Turns out that the lights don't work unless you put your room key in a slot by the door. In other words, you can't go off and leave all the lights on in your room unless you don't care whether or not you get back in. Seems very sensible to me.

Posted by holly at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)

February 26, 2008

Hey, Leader Dude!

Not only willing but happy, as ever, to be months if not years behind the times in terms of my entertainment consumption, I recently watched Downfall, the 2004 movie about HItler's last days in his bunker. I found it really compelling and can understand perfectly why I was anxious to see it when it was released in US theaters three or four years ago, though I also don't feel it hurt me to watch a bunch of other things first.

One thing that made it so outstanding was the performance by Bruno Ganz, the actor who played Hitler--it was scary and horrifying and convincing, and compelling for precisely those reasons. (IMDb's bio for Ganz, by the way, states that he is the first German actor ever to portray Hitler, which seemed unlikely to me, so I googled the question, "What actors have portrayed Hitler?" and got a slew of hits, including a page listing someone's idea of the top ten onscreen Hitlers and a list of all actors who have played Hitler--turns out a number are German. But I'm still sort of marveling that I could find an answer to that question so quickly. Isn't the internet amazing?)

Anyway, one of the things that struck me was the way everyone called Hitler "Mein Fuehrer" (which, I learned also via the internet, means "My Leader"). Not once did anyone call him "Herr Hitler" or "Herr Fuerher," analogous after all to "Mr. President," a way of addressing a leader that makes more sense in German than in English: in German you actually say things like "Herr Doktor" or "Herr Professor" or whatever; but in English we don't say "Mr. Doctor" or "Mr. Professor" or any such thing except "Mr. President." No; it was always "Mein Fuehrer," except for a few times when kids or women called him "Uncle Hitler." Even his mistress called him "Mein Fuehrer."

Can you imagine? Can you imagine calling your political leader "My leader"? I mean, it's one thing to say, "I'm going to write to my senator," or "I'm so glad Rick Santorum is no longer my senator!" But that's different; I referred to Rick Santorum as "my senator" not because I embraced his occupation of that position, but to differentiate him from the 98 senators from other states, and to remind myself that I had to do my part to make sure Rick Santorum STOPPED being my senator.

I think recent events show that the United States is capable of electing and following really shitty leaders who then dupe us, quite easily, into embracing (at least aspect of) totalitarian government, betraying human rights, waging ill-conceived wars of aggression and sacrificing some of our most cherished freedoms. But I can't imagine us ever revering those leaders enough to call them, to their faces, as a sign of veneration and loyalty, "My President" or "My Vice-President." (god forbid!) Why, even in that horrible nightmare I had about dating W, I don't think I ever called him anything--not George, not Mr. President, not Mr. Bush, not Darling, and not even more appropriate titles like "You Fucking Asshole" and "Mr. Evil Incarnate."

And then there's the whole salute thing, the whole "Heil, Mein Fuehrer," the way Hitler liked to be greeted. Can you imagine? The movie is based partly on a memoir by Traudl Junge, who was Hitler's youngest secretary at the time he committed suicide. Can you imagine greeting your boss by raising your arm in a stiff salute and saying, "Hail, My Leader"?

I don't think Americans are capable of that. Having recently watched No End in Sight, and being able to remember the way my family and most of my Mormon friends supported Bush and the Iraq war in 2003, I know we can be responsible, through our leaders, for a lot of short-sighted, ill-conceived, selfish and evil things. But I think one of our saving graces--perhaps our only saving grace--is that we have a certain skepticism, not only of our leaders, but of veneration of leaders, that makes us unable to treat them with that much unquestioning loyalty, and eventually we do what we can to get rid of the bastards--even if we let them cause a hell of a lot of damage during their tenure in office.

I try to imagine some American saying, "Hail, My Leader" to the president and I can envision only two scenarios. The first is something like a scene from The West Wing where some White Staffer says, "Good Morning, Mr. President," but there's no salute. The other thing I come up with is some skateboarder waving at Barack Obama and saying, "Hey, Leader Dude!"

And frankly, that gives me hope.

Posted by holly at 2:57 PM | Comments (6)

February 11, 2008

Finally, I Finish "The War"

My habit of watching stuff on TV months after everyone else has seen it continues.... I just finished watching Ken Burns’ documentary on World War II, aptly titled The War.

I am quite glad I waited to watch this, as I had time to gather opinions from others who watched it as it was televised, particularly from my friends who, like me, are very interested in military history. They said pretty much the same thing: “It was good, but not great. I thought I would LOVE it, and I didn’t. I only liked it."

So I sat down to watch it with lowered expectations, and because I expected less, I was pleased and surprised when I ended up liking it A LOT--maybe I didn't LOVE it, but it was close.

There were a few moments where I got to feel smart, because I knew what was coming: I am interested in the Battle of the Bulge--the name just arouses curiosity, and it began on my birthday--so I knew what was going on when the narrator mentioned that German troops started moving into the Ardennes in December 1944. (Though I admit I never made it through all of Band of Brothers--just found it too tedious and didn’t care for some of the actors.) I thought I knew the significance of the USS Indianapolis, since I had read all about its sinking, and the horrible blunders that led to about 900 men, originally hopeful of rescue, bobbing along for days in shark-infested water without food, potable water or lifeboats. (The reason the grisly old shark hunter in Jaws hated the animals so much was that he was a survivor of the Indianapolis, which is often called "the worst naval disaster in US history," though more men died on the USS Arizona--I guess it's that whole fighting off sharks thing, which could have been avoided had anyone paid attention to the fact that the Indianapolis didn't show up at dock when it was supposed to, that makes it worse.) I did not know, however, that when it was torpedoed and sunk, it was returning from delivering the first atomic bomb to Tinian.

One thing I really liked about the series was its use of Eugene Sledge, whose memoir With the Old Breed is one of my favorite books and has been called by a number of military historians “One of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war” (Paul Fussell) and “one of the most important accounts of war that I have ever read” (John Keegan). I teach it often and students find it profoundly moving and almost life-changing--you read it and you realize how much you don’t know, how much you’ll never know, how much separates combat veterans from those of us who either merely read about such things or simply don’t want to know. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here’s one of the passages we often refer to in classes, about the fighting on Okinawa:

The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn’t a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire, flooded craters with the silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment--utter desolation.

The stench of death was overpowering. The only way I could bear the monstrous horror of it all was to look upward from the earthly reality surrounding us, watch the leaden gray clouds go skudding over, and repeat over and over to myself that the situation was unreal--just a nightmare--and that I would soon awake and find myself somewhere else. But the ever-present smell of death saturated my nostrils. It was there with every breath I took.

I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogal Pocket on Peliliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

.... We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity.

I was also struck to see Paul Fussell lose his composure and tear up. Fussell is an old acquaintance of mine; at least, that’s how I think of him. I first encountered him in an undergraduate creative writing class on poetic forms, via his first book, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (which is still in print 40 years after its original publication). But it was his book about World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, that made me a fan of his analyses of the literature and actual events of modern warfare. In print, Fussell comes across as unsentimental and cynical--or, in his terms, “a pissed-off infantryman.” He is notorious for a very provocative essay called “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” I put that essay in a special place when I discuss his work, preferring to focus on the other ways in which he has “given the Second World War a uniformly bad press, rejecting all attempts to depict it as a sensibly proceeding or to mitigate its cruelty and swinishness” (Fussell, “My War”). If you watch many documentaries about war, you see him all the time, and the voice of that pissed-off infantry man is so strong, and he’s so stoic in most of his appearances, that it was shocking to me to see him begin to cry.

One other thing I liked about the series was that it serves as a good antidote to an attitude I have encountered a time or two in my classes: the sense that the real war was fought in Europe, that the only war that mattered was the one against the Nazis. A student in my class actually said once, when we read Sledge, “It’s good to learn about the war in the Pacific, because you just don’t hear much about it. It’s pretty obvious that it really wasn’t that important.”

“I’d have to disagree with that,” I said. “After all, World War Two started and ended for us in the Pacific.”

“World War Two started in Europe; everyone knows that,” he said.

“We didn’t enter the war until Pearl Harbor, remember?” I said. “The Japanese attacked us, and then we declared war on both Japan and Germany. Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, but we didn’t enter the war until December 1941.”

“Well, at the time, people weren’t as concerned about the war with the Japanese,” he insisted.

“Yes, they were,” I said. “My dad was nine when the war started, and he was obsessed with Guadalcanal. My mother was four when the war started, and she had nightmares about the Japs coming to get her. Plus we rounded up all people of Japanese descent and put them in internment camps, remember? We didn’t do anything to people of German or Italian descent, even though those countries were our enemies too. And don’t forget who we dropped the atom bombs on.” But he just wouldn’t budge. To him, the war in the Pacific didn’t have the veneer of nobility conferred after the fighting by the liberation of the inmate of the Nazi death camps--the full horror of which American politicians, military planners and the press downplayed, even after the Russians, who found them first, issued reports on them--so it wouldn’t matter as much to history, and couldn’t have mattered as much while it was going on.

Anyway. I found the series worth my time. I was moved and informed by it, and I hope that if you haven’t seen it, you’ll take the time to watch it.

Posted by holly at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2007

Movies About Men, For Women

In his comment to my entry about why I like the sex scene in Latter Days, MohoHawaii noted that he “always thought that there should be a larger market for romance stories that cross the gender divide. The straight female audience is largely untapped as consumers of male-male love stories. This is a potentially huge market, since there are 10 to 20 times as many straight women as there are gay men.”

For whatever reason, I’ve been an enthusiastic part of that market since even before I officially reached adulthood. One of my very first entries on this blog was about my movie-watching habits in the 1980s. I decided as a college freshman that I’d see pretty much any movie back for a “revival” (which was important back in the days before you could easily rent or buy a copy of a movie, making revival houses unnecessary) or anything that was a “classic.” This decision was facilitated by the fact that UA’s student union had a HUGE movie theater in it, and it showed only second-run movies or revivals, for a mere buck-fifty. As I’ve mentioned, the first movie I went to see there was A Clockwork Orange, which I walked out of; the second movie I went to see was La Cage aux Folles, which I loved and my roommate hated.

I made a habit of dragging roommates to movies I really wanted to see, which is how, as a junior, I persuaded my 17-year-old sister (yes, I roomed with my sister--I actually roomed with all three of my sisters at one point or another) to see both Risky Business (had that dreadful R-rating, though in the early 80s ratings weren’t quite such a big deal in the church) and Another Country, which was rated a mere PG but was all about homosexuality at some British public school.

I’m not sure how many teenage Mormon females would be so enthusiastic about a mannered art film exploring the difficulties of conducting a gay love affair at boys' boarding school, difficulties exacerbated because one boy had just hung himself after being caught en flagrante by a headmaster. But my sister and I LOVED it. And really, it’s not so very remarkable that we loved it, because it was an interesting script and beautifully cast, emphasis on beautiful: it featured the very young Colin Firth, Rupert Everett and Cary Elwes in their earliest starring roles.

I’ve talked to gay men who shrug when I mention that movie and say, “Oh, it was OK.” I watched it a few years ago when it came out on dvd; it wasn’t as good as I remembered, but I still liked it. And I think I liked it for one of the reasons I liked Latter Days, and that’s the fact that women were not depicted as adversaries in that movie.

Of course, in Another Country, women are not really depicted at all: they don’t really exist. Rupert Everett’s character has a mother we see once or twice; Colin Firth’s character has a girlfriend we never see. But for the most part, women are irrelevant in that movie.

Compare that to something like Maurice, where women are cast in the role of adversary or impediment, not very intelligent or worthy ones, either; rather, they are the temptation or social crutch one character succumbs to, leaving the other broken-hearted and alone with his unspeakable, unshakable desires.

Or think of Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which a gay character comes home and crawls into bed. His wife wakes and begins to kiss and caress him, attempting to initiate sex. Furious at having to deny himself what he really wants and engage in sex he doesn’t enjoy, the man makes the sex absolutely brutal, so vicious and violent that by the time he rolls off his wife, she’s wounded and weeping.

Or think of Total Eclipse, a fairly crappy movie hardly anyone saw, where Paul Verlaine is unwilling to commit to a relationship with Arthur Rimbaud (Leo DiCaprio), because “he loves his wife’s body.” But loving his wife’s body doesn’t stop him from becoming so annoyed at the way she’s intellectually inferior to his male lover on the side that he sets her hair on fire.

Or think of Sordid Lives, which has some really lackluster performances (the lead, for example) but some really great ones--it’s how I became a Beth Grant fan. OK, a lot of the female characters in that movie are very sympathetic. But there’s also the dreadful female psychiatrist who’s trying to make Brother Boy straight by forcing him to look at her genitals.

Or think of Wilde, or of Oscar Wilde’s life. Wilde liked his wife, Constance; he felt fondness and affection for her, and doted on her when she was first pregnant. But she didn’t provide the kind of companionship he really wanted. After Wilde meets Robbie Ross, Constance becomes a mere bit player in his life. After Wilde meets Bosie, she’s essentially written out of the action. Wilde’s actions destroy both himself AND his wife, but foremost in his concerns is always Bosie, the person he was in love with, not the person he married.

Or think of Angels in America, and the way Harper is a not-that-bright, not-that-appealing (not-that-believable), depressed, neurotic hindrance that Joe must escape in order to become a more authentic person.

I could go on and on. And the point is not to say that there’s anything necessarily wrong with these movies, because I believe they’re depicting real phenomena. I have no problem believing, for instance, that in England during the time surrounding the Great War, for a gay man who fell in love at university, it was really upsetting, confusing and humiliating when the guy you were in love with--and who claimed to love you back--spurned you in order to marry a woman, which is the story in Maurice. I managed to enjoy the movie perfectly well, even though women were depicted primarily as adversaries as obstacles; it’s just that Maurice is by no means my favorite Merchant Ivory film or favorite Forster novel. (That would be A Room with a View, on both counts.)

Then compare all these movies--one in which women are irrelevant, a bunch in which women are the nasty plot complication--to Latter Days, where women are friends, roommates, mentors, mothers (and not nearly as nasty as the patriarchs), co-workers and even employers, but never discarded spouses or lovers.

Think of it in terms of my all-time favorite gay/transgendered movie: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The only woman Hedwig has to reject is herself, the person Hansel became in order to please the first husband. After Tommy encounters Hedwig’s angry inch and freaks out, then tries to make it all better by saying, “But I love you,” Hedwig replies, angry and hurt, “Then love the front of me.” It means something very different when an unhappily/incompletely transgendered biological man says that to another man than if a straight woman says it to a gay man.

In Emily Pearson’s essay "Irreconcilable Differences," about her mixed orientation marriage, she notes that watching the play about their marriage by her ex-husband, Steve Fales, felt like “being dismembered by an ice pick.” She also writes about reading a review of the play in which the reviewer noted that

As important as his relationship with his wife is to his story--and as much as his desire to respect her privacy may be commendable--it’s disconcerting how completely she disappears from his ‘Confessions’ between courtship and divorce.”

I was floored. The reviewer had, in one sentence, summed up my entire marriage. I had completely disappeared between our courtship and divorce. Just as my mother, and every other straight woman I knew who had married a gay man, had completely disappeared between courtship and divorce.

I recognize the need for gay men to tell the truth of their stories. I applaud the effort. But I cannot applaud the perpetuation of stories in which the plot is designed from the get-go for women to be adversaries, impediments, that which must be abandoned in order for the man’s real story to unfold. And that is what happens when we act like mixed-orientation marriages are examples of brave, courageous, admirable choices on the part of the men who pursue them. They’re not. They might be understandable choices, and some gay men might make a better go of it than others. I'm not saying they should be forbidden or punished. (From what I've seen, in most cases, the marriage itself and the dreadful aftermath are usually punishment enough.) But they’re not something we should admire--they’re not, in other words, something we should make “politically correct.”*

So I think that’s one reason I like Latter Days more than any gay Mormon man I’ve ever met likes it: it doesn’t denigrate women or women's sexuality. It doesn’t treat straight women as maddening manacles or millstones preventing the main characters’ happiness, or as unfortunate but unavoidable casualties along the course of the main characters’ voyages of discovery. It doesn’t even turn women into irrelevancies the main characters need not worry about. It treats them as people, entitled to respect and esteem, and invested in very real and respectable ways in the main characters’ well-being.

So if someone wants to tap into the potential audience straight women could be for romances about gay men, I think all of that is important to keep in mind.

*That, by the way, is Ben Christensen’s current way of trying to defend the whole business of mixed-orientation marriages: he marvels that his critics somehow missed the fact that he asked, "Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that’s what he chooses to do?"

I didn't miss the question; I spent 7000 words explaining why it's not politically correct, but I'll provide the short answer here: because most marriages between gay men and straight women privilege male well-being at the cost of female well-being. I also noted, "Christensen demands not only the continued right of gay men to marry straight women, but approbation and approval for doing so, and he has received even that." He's not brave enough to do what he wants regardless of what other people think of him; he wants everyone to approve him, and he becomes petulant when they don't.

On his blog, he recently asked if I or others like me would "accuse a woman expressing her right to marry another woman of having an overblown sense of entitlement? No; Holly has said as much. Why then the double standard? Why are some choices more politically correct than others?"

Jesus Christ, why are some people so much poorer at clear reasoning than others?

Some choices are more politically correct than others because some choices are more beneficial to society and individuals, while others are more harmful. Most mixed-orientation marriages are dreadful failures that bring misery and heartache to those involved, including spouses and the children these marriages produce.

Gee? Why wouldn't society offer such marriages its most enthusiastic endorsement? Well, you can only note that for a really long time, the Mormon church did.

That, Ben, is why your choice is less "politically correct" than others. Ain't no double standard there--just the simple awareness that it is unethical for society to promote choices in which the cost of one person's happiness/ comfort/ convenience/ pleasure come at the cost of someone else's suffering. Your marriage might be one of the few exceptions--you and FoxyJ might live your entire lives pleased as punch with your arrangement--but for most people who end up in them, marriages like yours are unnecessary, unmitigated disasters. Because most people in and out of such marriages can see that, they find your defense of mixed-orientation marriages--not just mixed marriages themselves, but your entire defense of them--not only politically incorrect, but naive, foolish and pitiable. Is that really so hard to see?

So Ben, there's no double standard in the fact that people like me are ardent supporters of the right to marry for two people who are fervently in love and who have a clear understanding of what they're offering each other in a marriage, regardless of gender, but aren't so big on the idea of sexually naive dudes blind to their own privilege saying, "I want what everyone else has, just because. Why doesn't everyone approve of me when I do whatever I want?"

You might as well argue that there should be no double-standard about drinking: if it’s OK for adults to drink, why isn’t it OK for 14-year-olds to drink? If it’s OK for a 30-year-old guy to drink four whiskey and sodas during a Friday night at a bar with his friends, why isn’t it politically correct for a 30-year-old pregnant woman to drink three cosmos that same Friday night? Why the double standard? Gee, could it have something to do with the fact that one course of action is far more likely to cause harm than another?

But since someone probably will argue that there should be no law prohibiting teenagers from buying alcohol, or else argue that all drinking should be politically incorrect, let me illustrate the problems with Ben's logic in another example involving marriage. In some states a 16-year-old can marry provided s/he has parental consent; in other states, second cousins can marry. So why shouldn't it be politically correct to marry your 16-year-old second cousin if that's what you choose to do? Why is that any different from marrying your 21-year-old fourth-cousin-once-removed, especially if she's not done with college? She's still younger than average, and you're still related. So why the double standard?

In other words, Ben, just get over the fact that people don't always approve of what you do, and live your live according to your own convictions and preferences, or else make choices that will more easily win you respect.

Posted by holly at 8:18 PM | Comments (7)

December 19, 2007

Maybe It Really Was Two Minutes In Heaven

Episode 18 of VM, which I discussed yesterday, opens with Veronica making out with Deputy Leo (whose reappearance near the end of season 3 is a much needed bright spot) before her front door. He wonders why he’s never been invited in and wants, he says, “to get a really good, long look at your bedroom ceiling.”

“Wow! College girls must be easy,” she replies.

The focus of the scene is the talking, not the kissing. There’s no dramatic music, nothing unusual in the camera shot. You understand, from everything in the scene itself, that these two people like each other, but you also understand that Leo likes Veronica a lot more than she likes him. I thought Deputy Leo was a great character and was sorry Veronica wasn’t nicer to him. But the show doesn’t intend for them to have incredible chemistry, and they don’t. The show does intend for Veronica and Duncan to have incredible chemistry, and they still don’t.

The show intends for Veronica and Logan to have incredible chemistry, and they do. And it makes sense that they do. Because as they work together on things like finding out who stole the money at the poker game, what’s going on with the various witnesses who claim to have seen Lynn Echolls jump off the bridge or ride away in a van, who is using the credit cards of Logan’s supposedly dead mother, they come to see one another’s virtues and vulnerabilities.

The kiss signifies something complicated and wonderful: they’ve discovered they have an emotional connection. As they acknowledge this emotional connection, it allows for an embodied attraction. (I use that slightly odd phrase because I think it covers more than calling the attraction merely “physical,” as opposed to some other sort, like “emotional” or “intellectual.” Emotions and thoughts are not just emotional and intellectual, they are embodied, and can cause physiological changes, including alterations in blood pressure, pulse, expression, posture, digestion, etc; and embodiment includes things like the way we carry ourselves, what our voices sound like, and how we adorn or decorate our bodies.) Admitting and acting on that attraction allows their emotional connection to deepen. And lust is part of every aspect of the embodied attraction and connection.

These people want each other, and the kiss makes it clear. OK, it’s a pretty tame kiss in a lot of ways: it’s just a first kiss, and just first base, and they’re juniors in high school, and while Veronica isn’t a virgin in that she was roofied and raped while unconscious, she’s never had consensual sex she remembers, so she could be considered a kind of psychological virgin. But there are little things, aside from the camera work and soundtrack, that show how passionate this kiss is. One gesture I particularly love is when Logan slides his hand down to the small of Veronica’s back and stops there for a moment: he knows that according to the protocol of a first date, his hand can’t venture any farther down, but it then allows him to slide his hand back up along her spine--not too far up, mind you--but this time, his hand is under her shirt. The kiss continues a moment longer, before they break apart and stare at each other, alarmed, excited and confused. There’s an awkward disengagement from the embrace, then Veronica goes to her car and shrugs at Logan before she gets in and drives away. Days later, after an inconsequential conversation about something else, Veronica will think to herself, “All right-y, Logan. We’ll just skip over the two minutes in heaven we had. You want to pretend it never happened? No argument here. My lips, for all intents and purposes, are sealed,” but there’s virtually no talking involved in this kiss. And it wasn’t two minutes in heaven: it was closer to a minute.

I acknowledged Monday that I could watch a fairly explicit, completely naked sex scene I enjoyed and admired, and still not get worked up, because the sex wasn’t about me. Whereas this kiss I’ve just described is, as I’ve already acknowledged, pretty tame. And yet, as I imagine my account of the details make clear, watching it is a complete turn-on. This is because the kiss replicates both my experience and my fantasies in really lovely ways. The kiss is a nice, accurate representation of what I have been taught to consider the early stages of how you act when you want to deepen not feelings of friendship, nor admiration or respect or esteem (though I think things develop more nicely when you feel all those things), but feelings of lust. And I have found, that just as turned out to be the case with Veronica and Logan, lust can make you feel more kindness, affection, respect and tenderness for the person with whom you explore it.

I grew up being told, flat-out, “Lust is evil.” We had countless lessons on it in every venue the church could provide. Lust is evil. Love is pure and virtuous, and completely unconnected to lust, which is evil. Lust is an evil feeling, and the actions that proceed from it are, from start to finish, evil. Never mind that, more than just about any other branch of Christianity, Mormonism is obsessed with sex, scorning and condemning celibacy as abnormal and insisting everyone get married, while the big whoop-de-doo reward of Mormon heaven is that you get to have sex for all eternity, which you wouldn’t find much of a prize if you didn’t have an active enough libido to experience lust to some degree and with some frequency. In Mormon culture and doctrine, you get married, you have sex, but somehow, you’re supposed to do it without feeling lust, feeling only this other, pure desire for children or SOMETHING that is divorced from anything erotic or bodily--again, ironic, since Mormons claim to love bodies, and insist that God has a body.

I don’t believe lust is evil, any more than hunger or illness or being incredibly, incredibly cold, or even buoyant good health, all of which can also prompt people to commit evil acts. (I think people get up to mischief sometimes when they’re feeling REALLY good.) I believe that the Mormon church’s vilification of lust is evil, and one more reason that Utah is the most depressed state in the nation.

All right. I have to run off to meet a student now and I’m going to be late. But I’m still moving towards my final point, and I promise to get there eventually. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by holly at 1:45 PM | Comments (3)

December 18, 2007

The Lead-Up to Two Minutes In Heaven

Warning! This entry contains spoilers! If you A) haven’t seen seasons I or III of Veronica Mars and B) intend to watch them some day and C) are upset by spoilers (I’m not), then read at your own risk.

If you look at the calendar on my blog, it shows that I took a full week off from blogging, Sunday December 9 through Saturday December 15. I completely missed National Blog Posting Every Day Month or whatever November is called; I was traveling and away from home for over half the month, and much of the time I was gone I didn’t have reliable internet access, so there was just no way I could have done that gig.

I decided, however, that I’d compensate by posting every single day for a week or ten days in December, and I thought December 5 through 15 would be ideal as those days (even though that’s actually 11 days). But I got distracted on December 8, and what distracted me was a sweater I started last spring and really want to finish before 2008 rolls around, and Veronica Mars.

Several weeks ago I got this coupon from Borders offering me 40% of an dvd boxed set. It occurred to me that I had never gotten around to watching Season III of Veronica Mars, and while I’d heard it sucked, I wanted to see the magnitude of suckage for myself. So I bought the boxed set, took it home, forgot about it for a while, and then decided what the hell, I should watch it. (Especially since I had this sweater I wanted to finish up, and I like to knit while I watch tv and vice versa. It’s a good way to make tv time productive, and to keep me from getting bored with rows of stockinette stitch.)

And the season sucked. It really, really sucked. The over-arching story lines providing continuity from episode to episode sucked; the plots of individual episodes often sucked; the character development sucked. OK, there were plenty of great performances: from the first moments of the show I really enjoyed seeing both Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni on screen, and I especially liked them together. But great performances can’t compensate for a crappy script.

And OK, there was still plenty of witty, intelligent, sparkling dialogue, but if I wanted to watch something with lively banter but ludicrous, unbelievable plots driven awkwardly along by stupid contrivances and the most inane inexplicable choices on the parts of the main characters, I would have made it through more than four episodes of The Golden Girls--or wait, was it Gilmore Girls? I swear I can hardly tell those two shows apart: they both feature some excessively close (to the point of being kind of grossly claustrophobic) relationship between a mother and daughter living in some insular, retiring (retirement?) community; they both have characters who are obsessed with sex and money in very cliched, banal ways; and they both require you to suspend entirely not only your disbelief but your rational wits and any knowledge you might have about human beings actually behave--though one about the old ladies sharing an apartment isn’t quite so bad on that front as the one about the 30-something single mom in New England.

But I digress.

So, VM3 sucked, and one of the worst things about it was who Veronica was with when the season ended. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t with Logan, it’s that Piz, the replacement boyfriend, was SO BORING that he made Duncan (who was so boring that he was kicked off the show as a way to placate the show’s fans, because they quite rightly HATED Duncan) seem like Fourth of July fireworks. Someone in casting or production of that show has a thing for bland boys.... I was trying to figure out who Piz would be in the Buffyverse. He wouldn’t be Riley, because Riley is at least hot, and Marc Blucas could convincingly deliver a comedic line like, “You’re in the thrall of the dark lord!” from the “Buffy vs. Dracula” episode. (I have a beef with Riley haters. I think there’s a reason Marc Blucas is the only one from the show, aside from SMG, to garner many roles in feature films, and the reason has to do with the fact that he’s talented, tall, attractive and affable.) He certainly wouldn’t be Xander, the romantic underdog, because although Xander is discussed as this kind of hapless schlub, he’s really funny, pretty insightful, and quite attractive too. Piz wouldn’t even be disposable love interests Scott Hope or Parker Abrams. Instead, he’d be Graham, Riley’s emotionless and forgettable sidekick in the Initiative.

And there are other reasons why it sucked, which I may develop into a paper someday, because they have to do with the ways teenagers do and don’t interact with adults, which is part of what I analyze in teen tv. But I won’t discuss that here. Instead, I’ll tell you that I kept watching it, a bit compulsively, wondering how it could possibly get worse, only to find out. Suffice it to say, that it sucked so bad, that I had to mitigate the nasty feeling of needing a shower it left me with, and the best way I could think of to do that was to watch Season 1 yet again.

And VM1 is still fabulous. That first season is so vastly superior to virtually all other television I’ve ever seen that I can forgive the crappy follow-ups. I especially like the Logan story--but then, who doesn’t?

Of course I HATED Logan Echolls the first few episodes--couldn’t understand why the show was subjecting me to this vile, vile character. At the end of the sixth episode, he walks into a closet full of belts and selects one, tests its strength. I thought, “Great! He’s going to hang himself! I will no longer have to watch this dreadful person fuck up everyone else’s life!” But turns out he was just choosing the belt his father would beat the crap out of him with, and that it was someone else in the Echolls family would who commit suicide.

But then you realize what a thorough asshole his dad his, and there’s the whole thing with his mother’s suicide, Logan’s conviction that she’s not really dead and his request that Veronica help him track her down because he needs to know she’s all right. By the time he realizes that his mother really did kill herself and collapses, heartbroken and sobbing, into Veronica’s arms, I wasn’t sure I liked this character, but I at least felt compassion for him and saw him as complex and human.

And then, there’s Episode 18, “Weapons of Class Destruction,” where Logan, all knight-in-puka-shells-ish, comes to rescue Veronica when the creepy camo-wearing, fertilizer-buying weirdo gets in her car and instructs her to drive to the Camelot Motel, all of which Logan overhears because she was on the phone with him when the guy got in the car. He punches the guy really hard in the face several times, and, upon discovering that the guy is an undercover FBI agent, still refuses to trust him, delivering the memorable line, "Dream on, Jump Street. I’m not leaving you alone with her.”

A few moments later, Veronica walks out of the motel room after talking to the FBI dude. Logan leans against the wall, asks “Are you OK?” She murmurs “Mm-hmm,” then kisses him quickly on the lips to say thanks before shaking her head and walking away--because after all, until a few weeks earlier, she LOATHED this guy so much she could barely stand to be near him.

And Logan grabs her arm, pulls her around to face him, and the two of them make out on the balcony of this seedy hotel while the music swells and the camera pulls away and circles around them in this sweeping romantic gesture. The very first time I saw it and half the times I’ve seen it since then, I stood up and clapped and shrieked in delight, because it was really sexy and completely unexpected and absolutely earned and ever so, ever so RIGHT. (Yes, the scene plays on all sorts of stereotypes and predictable fantasies. It's still a surprise, and it still works.)

Now, believe it or not, the point I want to make about this wonderful heterosexual kiss is related to what I wrote yesterday about a really moving gay sex scene. But once again I’ve already written a lot, and I don’t want this entry to be so long no one takes the time to read it in any detail. (I know what blog-readers sometimes do with really long entries, because I’m a blog reader myself and I occasionally do it too: we skim.) So you’ll have to check back again later for the continuation of this argument.

Posted by holly at 10:37 AM | Comments (4)

December 17, 2007

Latter Gay Gaze

My friend Troy hates the movie Latter Days--just hates it. A year or two ago at Sunstone when he and I were hanging out, I mentioned that I liked it; he countered that he despised it. “What do you think is so bad?” I asked.

“You mean, besides the script, the plot, the acting and the direction?” he replied.

I didn’t respond, except to shrug. Yes, the movie has problems. There are elements of the script that really bug me. There are elements to the plot I find predictable and cliched. There are performances I find really weak.

But I still like it. I liked it enough to buy a copy for myself and to give a copy as a gift to someone else. I liked it well enough to listen to the commentary.

One major reason I like it is that as far as I’m concerned, it’s about the only movie I’ve ever seen to get a mission right--I would argue it gives a more accurate depiction of a mission even than God’s Army, which I found thoroughly annoying and lame. (Don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that they make the new guy lug his suitcase around while they go tracting, which I’m fairly certain would never happen; that the main character goes back to BYU, dates and MARRIES his English TA while she's still his teacher (a BYU alum can correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather suspect the administration wouldn't be cool with that) and that the movie ends with her bringing him a cup of tea and sitting down at his feet to adore him; and that Richard Dutcher, who was about 40, plays a missionary of about 30 who dies quietly in his sleep from an inoperable brain tumor with no suffering or puking his guts out or whatever, so much so that no one even knows he's sick. I hate on principle all movies where people die quietly in their sleep from inoperable brain tumors. Anyway, aside from all that, I found the movie so vacuous and forgettable that I can’t remember what happened, and so can’t really tell you why I hated it in detail, though I think the reasons I’ve already listed constitute solid ground.)

But back to Latter Days. I like it for moments. There’s a moment where one elder grabs another and says, “I’m going to hit you, elder, and it’s going to hurt.” Pretty much. I liked it for Steve Sandvoss, the guy who plays the gay missionary--he has a sweetness and a decency I found both sympathetic and genuine, and it reminded me of the elders I liked best on my mission--some were really good young men.

But the thing I like best about it is the sex scene.

It’s not just that both actors are young, hot and well-muscled, so that the viewer is treated to some really nice views of beautiful male asses. It’s that the actors go for it. There’s a moment (one of those moments I like it for) when, after a hurried disrobing, they embrace and then positively fling themselves together onto the bed. It’s passionate, hot, and tender.

And after the sex, the guys sit naked on the bed and stroke each other and talk. The experienced guy in the equation says to the recently deflowered, soon-to-be-excommunicated elder, “I thought you’d be more reticent.” (Which is another reason I like it--reticent is a good word that people are reticent about using.) Rebecca, whom I try not to resent for deleting her entire blog, once wrote an entry about how watching these two guys make sweet love somehow brought tears to her eyes. I feel the same way.

I don’t always like sex scenes. A lot of them feel contrived, staged and manipulative (which isn’t surprising, since they are) and if I’m not emotionally invested in the relationship between the characters, I don’t really care about seeing them get it on. That’s one main reason I don’t care much for porn: aside from a sort of anthropological or informational interest--oh, so that’s how this industry works; that’s what the audience for this stuff expects; huh, I hadn’t known that particular activity was really part of the repertoire--I often find it fairly boring, which isn’t surprising since for the most part it’s designed to be emotionally vacuous.

But I love this sex scene. I could watch it over and over and not feel bored or dirty or cheap--or, for that matter, particularly aroused, since it’s a sex scene that has no room for me or any woman. I can’t imagine what I’d do in that scene; it sparks no fantasy; and so it doesn’t turn me on. (And I know all that because I did just watch it over and over, with the commentary on and off, so that I'd be accurate when I discussed it now.)

I remember reading a Dan Savage (whose most recent book is reviewed here) column in which someone asked him why straight men were turned on by lesbian porn, but straight women weren’t turned on by gay male porn, since in both cases what was depicted were scenes in which same-sex participants found ways to pleasure one another. He reasoned that in lesbian porn, men could always assume that they’d be welcome, and certainly there would be plenty of orifices into which a penis could be inserted, which, after all, is still what most people in our heteronormative world consider “sex.” Whereas in gay male sex, there are already accommodating orifices for any penis present, so any additional orifice is superfluous, and women therefore have a harder time creating a fantasy in which they’d be welcomed into the scene.

Savage’s argument about the possible welcomeness of a penis in a lesbian relationship is supported in part by this passage from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King, about the early stages of her first lesbian love affair:

Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in the submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on the search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

Candles melt/ Carrots are tough/ Bottles can hurt you/ Might as well muff.

But countering the male fantasy of the “Hey, all these chicks would want me!” scenario, King also offers this insight, gleaned after her lesbian love affair ends and she goes back to heterosexual sex for a while:

After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boiler-maker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernable waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.

Now, I really am going somewhere with this; I didn’t just set myself the academic exercise of analyzing a couple depictions of gay sex. But I have written enough for today, so you’ll have to come back later to read the rest of what I’m getting at.

Posted by holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (6)

October 9, 2007

Lousy Ticket Sales the Fault of Female Actors

OK, I know lately I've been relying heavily on the "here's a link to something upsetting we should all pay attention to" form of blogging, but the fact of the matter is, here's a link to something upsetting we should all pay attention to. Turns out that Warner Bros is going to stop making movies with women in the lead, because two recent vehicles for big-name stars (The Brave One, with Jodie Foster, and The Invasion, with Nicole Kidman), didn't earn much at the box office.

I admit I didn't see either movie, and don't plan to, but it wasn't because I don't like movies with women in them; it's because both movies looked to me like the scripts sucked.

Did I just make this up out of nothing, or did Erin Brockovich do pretty well at the box office? Chicago? Chocolat? Most every Austen adaptation, whether I liked it or not?

This points to a problem that has been noted with regards to reading audiences: women will read books about men, but men won't read books about women, so books about men are emphasized, even though women make up a larger share of book buyers and readers than men do. Apparently the same applies to movies, and now women will have to even fewer movies about women to watch. They'll just have to settle for more movies about men, because some men won't see movies about women--or even make them.

Thank the powers that be, once again, for the likes of Joss Whedon, L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll. And I for one shall boycott all Warner Bros films, even on Netflix--I'm just not going to support that shit.

Posted by holly at 12:29 PM | Comments (5)

September 18, 2007

Peanut Butter Is OK, I Guess

Tomatoes, potatoes, cocoa beans and chilies are among the food plants indigenous to the Americas that have been thoroughly appropriated by other parts of the world, to the point where they seem integral to certain nations’ cuisine or history: think of Italian food with tomato sauce. Think of Belgium without chocolate. Think of Ireland with a potato blight and crushing famine. Think of Indian food without the searing hot bite of a really potent chili pepper or two.

Peanuts, not so much. Plenty of the world has never taken to peanuts or peanut butter or any number of peanut-flavored things. As Chanson notes, the French find peanut butter pretty damn vile, and as I remember from my time in the UK a couple of decades ago, the British didn’t much care for it either.

The Chinese and their neighbors, however, managed to dig peanuts and their by-products and do some pretty great things with them, as anyone who has enjoyed spring rolls or noodles with peanut sauce will know. I prefer peanuts in savory food to any sort of peanut-y dessert.

Frankly the thing I like best about peanut butter is its history. In elementary school I read this fabulous biography of George Washington Carver, explaining how he convinced all these farmers to plant soil-enriching peanuts instead of just soil-depleting cotton as part of his crop rotation program. Once the peanuts were harvested, the farmers came to George and said, “OK, what do we do with these peanuts? ‘Cause there’s no demand for them at all.”

And George looked at them for a moment, then said, “I’ll be right back,” went into his lab and invented about 50 million uses for peanuts, one of which was peanut butter. (Does anyone besides me still have very fond memories of hearing Eddie Murphy describe how “George Washington Carver died penniless and insane, still trying to play a phonograph record with a peanut” as part of a "Black History Minute" on Saturday Night Live?)

Anyway.... I’m not nuts about peanuts. They’re OK, but I prefer other nuts, real nuts. (Peanuts, after all, are actually legumes, as you probably learned in fifth grade.) Pecans are my favorite nuts for baking--I like them in cookies and pies and cakes and streusel or whatever. There are pecan trees all over my hometown of Thatcher, Arizona--the church I went to as a child was in the midst of a pecan grove--and I would regularly pick a pecan off the ground, crack it and eat the fresh nut meat.... No nut tastes as good to me as a fresh pecan I’ve just cracked. I like walnuts and macadamia nuts for cooking too. I also enjoy roasted and salted almonds, cashews and pistachios. (I especially like cracking pistachios and sucking all the salt off the shell.) If all the other, better nuts are gone from the nut mix, I’ll eat Brazil nuts. I don’t like hazelnuts for some reasons.

I didn’t really like peanut butter when I was little because it tasted too peanut-y and the texture was weird and it wasn’t sweet enough, so my mother’s solution was to mix it with honey, which made it pretty damn good. I really liked spreading that mixture on saltines. Yum! Honey’s much better with peanut butter than jam.

And in general I like it even less now that I’m grown. Nine times out of ten, I’ll pass up any sweet that is peanut or peanut-butter flavored, but there’s always that tenth time....

OK, this is still running long, and I have more to say before I get around to sharing the cookie recipe. But I promise, I’ll post it soon.

Posted by holly at 11:20 AM | Comments (4)

June 30, 2007

We Will Mock You

I haven't watched Saturday Night Live in... a really long time. I have been assured that it's still on, and I guess I know that since every so often some new comedian shows up in some movie and I read in various news sources that this person got his/her start on SNL.

Most people in North America over the age of 11 or so have a favorite SNL skit, and most people over the age of 25 have a favorite cast. I am old enough to have watched the original cast and I know those very early episodes are classics and everything, but they're not the ones I remember most fondly. (Except for the skit about the floor wax that is also a dessert topping.) No, my favorite cast was the one about 1988, with Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Jon Lovitz, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, etc--you know, the era that brought us "Wayne's World," "The Church Lady"and "Sprockets."

One of my favorite skits--indeed, one of the skits most beloved by my entire family--featured guest star John Malkovich as Lord Edmund, a nobleman who accuses even the crescent moon in the day sky of mocking him. He is shown a very faithful and respectful portrait of himself, and erupts in rage because he thinks the artist mocks him with a "grotesque caricature." "You mock me!" he says to the painter. "You mock me, and I will not be mocked!"

And while all this is going on, his servants, played by Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey, are prancing behind him, mimicking his facial expressions and gestures, and saying, in a nasal falsetto, "You mock! You mock me! You mock me, and I will not be mocked!"

I haven't managed to convey the brilliance of this skit, I know, but trust me: it's pretty fuckin' funny.

It feels cheap to mock the cast of We Will Rock You, because after all, the biggest problems with the production, namely, the plot, the characterization and the script, aren't their fault. But it's hard to resist, because the plot, the characterization and the script heap contempt and scorn on boy bands and girl bands and any band that didn't start out rehearsing original songs in someone's garage. The show mocks musical performers who 1) perform someone else's lyrics and/or music and 2) have to audition to get a role or part in a band and 3) are chosen for their looks and dance moves as much as for their ability to sing, while their ability to play a musical instrument is largely moot and 4) are given opportunity to perform as part of a larger scheme to earn money for backers and producers who do not perform as part of this group and 5) are dressed, presented and coiffed to be seem slightly edgy, but really are marketed to a mainstream audience.

In other words, the show mocks its own performers; the performers deliver lines that mock the type of performers they are. But somehow, you're not supposed to notice or care about this irony.

So anyway, as I was driving back across the border to my home (which was fine except for the driving and the crossing the border part), I couldn't resist tweaking a Queen song or two, just as had been done in the show, in order to critique the show.

Let me first establish a rhythm. It goes like this:

Thump thump BOOM
thump thump BOOM

(and now I will add a few simple lyrics, directed to the lead of the production Dale and I saw:)

Buddy, you're a short guy, French guy
singing on the stage, gonna take on the world some day
Makeup's smudged on your face
You big disgrace
Shaking your ass all over the place
Listen!
We will, we will
MOCK YOU
We're singing
We will, we will
MOCK YOU
Everybody!
We will, we will
MOCK YOU

Oh shit!

(Brief but impressive guitar solo. This next part is dedicated to the surviving members of Queen.)

We paid our fees
We stood in line
We balked at each sentence
We cringed at most rhymes
For bad mistakes
littered acts one and two
Non-sequiturs teemed
and the chorus, it screamed
till your inane pastiche was through!
And the beat was going on and on and on and on
You have become whores, my friends
and you'll keep on selling out til the end
You are complete whores
You are complete whores
No time for scruples
‘cause you are complete whores
in the music world.

Posted by holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (3)

June 7, 2007

I'm Not Lost

Since I don't have cable and my reception via antenna is so lousy I can't stand to watch my television unless the picture on it comes from a vcr or dvd player, I generally watch the tv shows I'm interested in a season behind. Lately I've been reading about the season 3 finale of Lost, and apparently there's still all this concern about the "others."

But why? Seriously, why? I'm currently about two-thirds finished with season 2 thanks to Netflix, and it's bleedin' obvious who the "others" are. I mean, you've got Gavin Park pretending to be some Korean doorman who doesn't speak English, and Holland Manners pretending to be the devoted husband of a saintly middle-aged black woman. So what if Holland was killed by Darla and Drusilla while locked in his own wine cellar? So what if Gavin was turned into a zombie by The Beast and eventually decapitated by Gunn? We all know how cunning those lawyers and conjurers at Wolfram and Hart are at bringing people back from the dead. I'm telling you, if the secret cabal of the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart is powerful enough to have offices even on savage planets like Pylea in some alternate dimension, they're powerful enough to take over some savage island depicted on an alternate network.

I'm just waiting for the twist in season 4 where we find out all this to-doing about "the children" is a way to secure playmates for the preternaturally strong and wicked sextuplets Cordelia Chase (because she was the most fertile character in the entire Buffy-verse) conceived with Logan Echolls during Cordy's stint on Veronica Mars.

Mark my words.

Posted by holly at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)

January 22, 2007

Made in Sheffield

Having discussed British television in my last two entries, I figured I might as well continue the trend by telling you about something else I watched recently thanks to Netflix: a documentary called Made in Sheffield about the music that developed there in the 70s and early 80s.

As I mentioned last week, one of the things I did while visiting my family was watch youtube videos with my siblings. I insisted that both my brother and sister show their children the video to the 1984 version of Do They Know It's Christmas? and tell them about its historical and musical significance, because as I mentioned in my Christmas meme, it's one of my very favorite Christmas songs.... Anyway, my brother and I wanted to figure out who one particular singer was, and in order to do that, we had to do some internet research.

Turns out the guy in question was Paul Weller of The Jam and Style Council.... I own CDs by each band but I didn't recognize him because he looks nothing like that now, hasn't looked like that for a very long time. Anyway, in the process of finding that out, I came across a reference to said documentary.

Now, Sheffield is a place I've actually been. I doubt it's much of a tourist destination but I spent a week visiting friends there in 1984. So before I read about this documentary, I knew that Sheffield had been a steel manufacturing town, and that it supposedly produced good flatware. I knew it was the home of Def Leppard, which I tried not to hold against the place, as well as the home of Heaven 17, a band I quite enjoy.

What I didn't know until I started reading about this documentary was that two of the members of Heaven 17 (Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh) were also founding members of the Human League. This horrified me because I HATE and have always HATED the Human League, ever since the first miserable moment when I heard that dreadful single "Don't You Want Me Baby." (No. I don't. Go away.) Nor did I know that another band I really love, ABC, was from Sheffield also.

So my personal connection to the place, my interest in discovering how founding members of a band I loathed could go on to found a band I loved, and my interest in learning more about the history of ABC, meant that I had to watch the thing.

Now, as I have mentioned, I don't love punk. I don't hate it--I can be perfectly happy when a song by the Clash or the Ramones comes on the radio, but I've never felt the need to buy their albums. I can admire things about the punk aesthetic, its democratic and anti-establishment spirit, but as far as deriving pleasure from sounds and rhythms, in general I still prefer the complexity they were reacting against--Pink Floyd and Alan Parsons Project and so forth.

This documentary gave me a new perspective on the whole issue. To paraphrase one music critic interviewed in the film, a lot of people of the time were inspired by the Clash and the Sex Pistols--to go out and buy guitars, learn three chords and imitate what was already being done. But in Sheffield, they were inspired to apply the attitude of punk to the electronic music by the likes of Kraftwerk and make stuff that was "weird."

Chris Watson, of Caberet Voltaire, talks about early performances by "The Cabs" (as all the hip people in the film called the band): he and his friends would record these strange sounds, then drive around town in a van listening to the recordings they made. Eventually they decided to share it with the people of Sheffield, so they opened the doors of the van, turned the volume up, and drove around very slowly. For them, it wasn't just about music, but about an approach to all the arts--visual, auditory and written.

I was surprised to learn that at one point (long before anyone in the US had ever heard of them), the Human League was actually a very interesting band. Phil Oakey, the iconically coiffed singer for the Human League, discussed the fact that he and his band mates "thought we were the punkiest band in Sheffield. You know we were laughing at the bands that learned to play guitars ‘cause they bothered to learn their three chords. We used one finger" to play a keyboard. He also talked about how he and the record company decided to expel the two guys who founded the band and replace them with two women chosen for their looks and their dance moves--the women had never even sung when they were asked to go on tour with the Human League--so that he could create "the next Abba." (Which is how it turned into the band I so despise.)

I was also intrigued to learn that the vocalist for ABC, Martin Fry, didn't start out as a musician--he published a fanzine and was asked by Stephen Singleton and Mark White to join Vice Versa in order to play some electronic something or other he had no experience with. But then one day Stephen and Mark heard Martin sing, realized he had a better voice than Mark, their current vocalist, and reshaped the band and its material to suit Martin. The result was ABC's first album, The Lexicon of Love, the very first album in my alphabetized CD collection and one of my top favorite albums of all time.

I dig electronic music--I have for a very long time--but I admit that one thing I always liked best about ABC and Heaven 17 was their use of instruments I really like: brass and saxophone and so forth. So it was fascinating to learn about their roots in this scene where a group of people who considered themselves "sonic terrorists" and who thought they "were killing off rock and roll" were exploring how to "make music without musical instruments."

The documentary itself is only 52 minutes long, but there are extra interviews that I of course watched. I recommend it all. If you've seen it, or if you watch it any time soon, I'd like to know what you think.

Posted by holly at 5:47 PM | Comments (3)

January 21, 2007

To the Manor Born

As I discussed ever so long ago, I love Netflix, and I love it more as time goes by. Not only is it really convenient and easy, but whatever software they use for making recommendations is actually pretty good. Not only does it recommend popular, current stuff I might not have gotten around to adding to my queue without a little prodding, but it also manages to recommend older, more obscure stuff I might never have heard of any other way.

One such example is a television series I recently finished watching, To the Manor Born. It was recommended to me because I had just finished watching a bunch of British period pieces--the various renditions of the life of Elizabeth Tudor, the really fabulous adaptation of Bleak House. I read the blurb of TtMB: recent widow Audrey fforbes-Hamilton (played by Penelope Keith, and no, that is not a typo in fforbes) is forced to sell Grantleigh Manor, the estate where her family has lived for 400 years, when she discovers that her husband's death has left her bankrupt. The estate is purchased by one Mr. Richard De Vere (played by Peter Bowles), a dashing self-made millionaire (he runs a grocery store empire), social climber, and (gasp!) foreigner: although he can pass as English, the truth of the matter is that his parents were refugees who left Czechoslovakia at the beginning of World War II. Although she has to leave the manor, Audrey cannot leave her old way of life, despite the presence of a new landlord.

And I thought it sounded interesting enough and I ordered it.

But then it arrived and I saw on the dvd jacket that the series was made in 1979, and that put a different spin on things. I generally hate American tv from that time: Dallas, Love Boat, Laverne and Shirley--I can't watch that crap, and I didn't watch it when it was current--I hardly watched any prime-time television when I was in high school. And while the little British television I'd seen from that time occasionally seemed better written, the production values were often pretty dreadful.

I nearly returned the disk without watching it, but then I decided, what the hell, I might as well check it out. And I was surprised by two things: one, how much I actually enjoyed it, and two, that anyone could actually hold some of the attitudes Audrey regularly expressed. It was that whole sense of entitlement and privilege--the way she talked to her neighbors and servants! The references to the British class system and the "right" sort of people! It all seemed so outdated and antique. Of course I've read plenty of novels dealing with those very issues--but I can't think of a one of them set before the beginning of the Great War. And yet, I'm sure those attitudes still exist.... The whole thing was quite educational.

Despite the educational content, I wouldn't have kept watching if I hadn't been interested in all the characters, hadn't wanted to see what would happen next. But as I said, I actually enjoyed it--quite a lot, to be honest. I finished the last episode over the weekend. The entire series, which spanned three years, involves a mere 20 30-minute episodes. (And they really are 30 minutes long, not 22.) The fact that a season consists of only six or seven episodes might be one reason the writing was pretty good: they had time to get things right. And it also might be a reason why they didn't invest in better sets or more costumes--why lay out all that money when you won't be using something that many times?

So this is a really careful recommendation: if you like period pieces (it really does feel like one), if you're interested in the British class system, and if you like tv that is "unusual" by the standards of American network fare, watch this. It doesn't suck.

Posted by holly at 8:54 AM | Comments (5)

December 7, 2006

My Take on the Movie Meme

I got this from Dale--he got it from someone else.

1. Popcorn or candy?

Neither. I don't really like the taste of movie popcorn and I hate paying exorbitant movie theater prices for movie candy. Sometimes I buy candy ahead of time, or make my own popcorn and smuggle it in.... but usually I just like to watch movies and save my calories for later.

2. Name a movie you've been meaning to see forever.

Run, Lola, Run. I've been told it's really good.... but in grad school I had a friend who was getting an MFA in film production and I would have to sit through student film shows featuring LOTS of movies where people just walk down halls for 20 minutes or wash their hands repeatedly or whatever, and I just don't relish the idea of watching a movie that consists primarily of scenes of a woman running.

3. You are given the power to recall one Oscar and give it to something else. What do you choose?

Oh, god, only one?!

I'm really tempted to take away the 1990 best picture Oscar for Dances with Wolves and deliver it over to any of the other four contenders--DwW is schlock to begin with, and anything that inflates Kevin Costner's ego is a source of genuine evil; whereas I think Whoopi Goldberg's performance in Ghost (for which she won best supporting actress that year) might have elevated that movie to best picture status.... then again, maybe not. Or I could correct a historical wrong and see that the marvelous Peter O'Toole won for any of the wonderful roles he was nominated for.... But if I gave him the Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia, that would mean depriving Gregory Peck of the Oscar he won in 1962 for his role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and that would upset a lot of people; so perhaps I could do something about the 1964 Oscar for best actor, which went to Rex Harrison for playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady instead of to O'Toole for playing Henry II in Becket, except that I'm not sure that's such an injustice; but then, there's the other movie where O'Toole plays Henry II, The Lion in Winter, for which he was nominated but lost to Cliff Robertson in Charly.... what the hell was Charly and who has seen it? Oh.... it's an adaptation of Flowers for Algernon. Hmm.... that might be a wrong that truly needs righting.

In the end, however, I think I'd have to succumb to my hatred for that wretched mallrat Gwyneth Paltrow and deprive her of the Oscar she somehow won for Shakespeare in Love, and give it instead to the luminous Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth, which was, admittedly, so historically inaccurate that everyone involved should be ashamed. Nonetheless, Cate was really, really good at portraying one of my favorite historical figures of all time.

4. Steal one costume from a movie for your wardrobe.

Well, let's see.... I already own several versions of both Michelle Pfeiffer's and Halle Berry's Catwoman outfits from whichever Batman or Catwoman or Small Furry Mammal People movies they were in, and right now I'm lounging about in my Galadriel (Cate Blanchett's character in The Lord of the Rings, for those of you not cool enough to get the reference) outfit because it's just so stinkin' comfortable. As for when I want to make an impression, I never tire of dressing up in my version of the entire ensemble Scarlet O'Hara makes out of the green velvet curtains, though I've gotten a little bored with my Dorothy dress and my ruby slippers--I mean, who doesn't have a Dorothy outfit! Now that snow has arrived, my favorite outfit to wear to the grocery store is my Gandalf the Grey robe and cloak (I have a staff too, but it sticks too far out of the cart), though in summer, I prefer to buy my comestibles dressed as Barbara Bach in Caveman--for one thing, I get such good service at the meat counter that way! I admit I've always wanted some of those "shoes as hats" featured in Brazil, but those aren't an entire costume.... So I guess the new addition to my wardrobe will have to be the thigh-high boots and swingin' dress decorated not with fringe but with blond human hair (which is why it has such nice movement to it when she shimmies) that Hedwig wears at the end of "Wig in a Box."

5. Your favorite film franchise is....

Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I loved all three, though I did get a little tired of the way Elijah Wood would say, ever so earnestly, "Sam...." I went to midnight openings of the first two (I would have gone to a midnight opening of the third, but my life had complications), reread the books to prolong the pleasure, then bought each boxed DVD the day it came out. The books were really good, and the movies were good too: artistically refined, ethically complex, emotionally moving. I was really sad when there were no more to release.

6. Invite five living movie people over for dinner. Who are they? Why would you invite them? What do you feed them?

Do I have to? I don't know that I want to cook food for movie people. I'd rather just enjoy their work while I eat my dinner myself.

Well, if I must.... The first person I'd invite is Andrew Davies, the guy who writes the fabulous adaptations of all those British novels. I'd ask for tips on how he does it, and I'm sure his general conversation would be pretty damn enjoyable.

Next is a toss-up between Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. I find Johnny Depp really attractive but I'm not sure he'd be good dinner company. I'd be willing to feed Angelina, though, and talk to her for an hour or two. I'd like to know about her humanitarian efforts, and find out if she's as beautiful in person as she is on screen. She could bring Brad, or she could not.

Next would be.... Ang Lee, I guess. I'd ask him about the beginning of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, where the Chinese woman is listening to what sounds to me like The Mormon Tabernacle Choir on headphones. Plus he's a cool guy from Taiwan, who directed an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and made a luminously gorgeous movie set in the American West. Kind of combines a bunch of my interests there.

Speaking of Jane Austen novels.... I'd love to meet Emma Thompson. I'd ask her about adapting Jane Austen (she wrote the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, which Ang Lee directed) and about appearing in the "University Challenge" episode of The Young Ones.

Rounding out the guest list would be... Sandra Bernhard! Of course! Why didn't I think of her sooner? My reasons for inviting her are explained here.

As for the menu-- inviting Sandra means that I'd have to serve ham and a hot canned fruit cocktail compote, and the drinks list would have to include Remy Martin with a water back. I'd make Mexican food, probably, and a chocolate cheesecake for dessert. (I'll have to post the recipe for that one soon.)

7. What is the appropriate punishment for people who answer cellphones in the movie theater?

Watch this clip and find out.

8. Choose a male and a female bodyguard from a film.

Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones's Diary and Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I mean, Mark Darcy made a pretty good show out of trying to beat the crap out of Daniel Cleaver (plus he offered to pay for all the damage afterwards!) and Hedwig was willing to use a broken beer bottle to gouge out the eyes of any female fan who got to close to Tommy Gnosis. But even more valuable than their skills at fighting dirty would be all the fun I'm pretty sure I'd have when physical violence to my person was not an imminent threat.

9. What's the scariest thing you've ever seen in a movie?

I recently watched Hearts and Minds, a 1972 documentary about US involvement in Vietnam. There's actual film--not a still, but rolling film--of that Viet Cong officer being executed with a bullet to the brain, so that you see him stand there one second, then crumple and fall while blood runs out of his head. That really freaked me out, as did the stock footage of the little naked girl, all her skin burned off by napalm, running down the road, or footage of a woman carrying a baby, another napalm victim, its skin hanging in tatters from its arms and legs. I had to stop the movie and become hysterical at those points....

That's the scariest thing I've seen recently, maybe ever, because it's all a real depiction of real suffering inflicted by my government. But as a distant second, terrifying images that live on in my memory despite my best efforts to forget, I would have to name all two hours of Shakespeare in Love. To start with, the movie stars the loathsome Gwyneth! The characterization is inconsistent, while the jokes are absolutely moronic (could they have milked that inane line about "Romeo and Bertha the Pirate's Daughter" or whatever it was for one more tired, lame laugh?) and the plot is full of holes so gaping and substantial you could have marched Elizabeth Tudor's entire entourage through any one of them. Yet people liked this shit! It actually won awards!

10. Your favorite genre (excluding "comedy" and "drama") is

Musicals. Duh.

11. You are given the power to greenlight movies at a major studio for one year. How do you wield this power?

By writing several screenplays, hiring smart people to produce and direct them, and watching my new Hollywood career succeed beyond my wildest dreams.

12. If Jesus were to submit a synopsis of a documentary about life in America since 9/11, what would his p.o.v. be?

The frustrated, irate guy who says, "I'm outta here, but before I go, I want all you assholes to quit invoking my name when you go off and shoot people. And for christ's sake, quit asking for my help when all your war-mongering comes back and bites you in the ass."

13. Down in front, all you troublemakers.

I've already complained about adults who bring little kids to grown-up movies.

I tag anyone who's seen a movie in the past month, as well as anyone who hasn't blogged in a month.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)

November 5, 2006

A Little Love for Big Love

All the disks of season 1 of Big Love are somewhere in my Netflix queue, but I can't be bothered to move them closer to the top. First of all, I'm currently far too preoccupied with getting through season 2 of both Project Runway (which I'm rather obsessed with--if I had any skill in making patterns and such instead of just sewing them together, I'd be auditioning to get on) and Battlestar Galactica (which I respect and am intrigued by but find kind of tedious--the tone and tenor of each episode is too unvarying).

Plus I can't get all that excited about a watching a show that will require me to look at both Bill Paxton and Chloe Sevigny, two of my least favorite actors. I honestly don't understand why they are ever cast in anything. Shows with just one of them are bad enough, but I will really have to grit my teeth to make it through an entire season of something where the two of them share screen time. Chloe is so whiny, and has SUCH horrible posture: I want to slap her across the shoulder blades and scold, "Didn't your mother ever tell you how important it is to stand up straight?" As for Paxton, I find it a shame that he's not torn to pieces by aliens in every show he's in.

But I will watch Big Love some day, because I feel a commitment to seeing how Mormons are depicted in the mainstream media, yada yada yada. Then there's also the fact that one of the most interesting panels I attended at Sunstone was on Big Love, and two of the panelists were women who work on Mormon Focus, the pro-polygamy magazine that supposedly served as the inspiration for the series. These two women consider themselves "independent" polygamists, meaning that they are not affiliated with some fundamentalist group telling who to marry whom. And they LOVE the show.

These women, who were articulate, bright, educated and capable, if very conservatively dressed, love the show because they feel it portrays polygamists truthfully, sensitively, generously. It does a good job, they say, of depicting both the affection between the husband and the sister wives, as well as the strife than can occur. It also presents the polygamists as "normal" people who choose an alternative lifestyle.

Polygamy is seen by many people as extremely repressive for women--and I'm certain that in many forms (particularly the variety overseen by the likes of Warren Jeffs), it is extremely repressive. Nonetheless, the women in independent polygamist marriages are much more vocal and visible than the husbands, because the husbands can be prosecuted for bigamy and the women cannot. The women are vocal and visible in part because they are arguing for the decriminalization of polygamy between consenting adults (which I'll discuss further in a future post).

Neither woman on this panel, it should be mentioned, is actually in a polygamist marriage right now: one is a widow, and the other was a second wife, but not long after she joined the family, the first wife became unhappy with the arrangement and left. So these women are left in the position of espousing a lifestyle they cannot currently enjoy. It will come as a shock to learn, I'm sure, but it's not actually that easy to recruit "independent" women to "independent" polygamist marriages--independent women tend to want an independent husband of their own.

So that's why I will, someday, watch all of Big Love, just like I watched Orgazmo. I've seen two episodes of BL already, courtesy of some friends with Tivo, and I admit I wasn't overwhelmed, one way or the other. It didn't irritate me the way Angels in America did or impress me with its rigorous accuracy the way the South Park episode on Joseph Smith did. When I try to remember it now, I remember mostly annoyance: I was annoyed by the way the youngest wife dressed--no one trying to pass as Mormon would wear such skimpy outfits--and by the fact that the characters mispronounce "temple recommend," putting the stress on the last syllable of "recommend," as if it's a verb, when Mormons stress the first syllable--stuff like that would be so easy to fix if they just had a Mormon as a consultant for the show! And I didn't find Bill Paxton a good fit for the role he plays: he lacks a certain... glossiness Mormon priesthood holders exude, so the fact that I hate him to begin with made his position in the show even more annoying. But I've been told by plenty of Mos and Post-Mos that overall the show is pretty good and gets enough things right that you can enjoy it quite thoroughly. So I'll watch it all, truly I will--when I get done with the stuff I really want to see.

Posted by holly at 9:46 AM | Comments (6)

September 26, 2006

Crouching Horse-Horse-Tiger-Tiger Hidden Dragon

Since I've had a discussion of movies, I thought I'd continue the trend. Here's a review I wrote of "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" when it came out.

One of the first things I learned to say when I began studying Chinese was mamahuhu, which means "horse-horse-tiger-tiger." It is an idiomatic expression denoting something which is an uncomfortable hybrid, neither successfully this or that, nor even a worthy combination of the two; it's often translated as "mediocre" or "so-so." One of the first things I heard about Ang Lee's new movie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, was that Lee had described it as "Bruce Lee meets Jane Austen;" one of his assistants called it "Sense and Sensibility with sword fights."

I'm a big fan of Austen, and if there were anyone who could blend Bruce Lee and Austen successfully, it would be Ang Lee, whose first three movies were set (at least in part) in his native Taiwan; his fourth movie was Sense and Sensibility (1995). But I would have to say that I found this movie more horse-horse-tiger-tiger than tiger-tiger-dragon-dragon.

One big disappointment was the primary love story. "Jane Austen meets anything" must have at least one love story, and Crouching Tiger has several. The first involves Li Mu Bai (Chow Yung Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), who have long been in love but never admitted it for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Shu Lien's fiance was killed in battle next to Li Mu Bai. But their passion, supposedly on the point of bursting forth after years of restraint, isn't portrayed successfully. Mu Bai displays far greater passion in his devotion to his sword the Green Destiny, or his attempts to woo Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who repeatedly steals the Green Destiny from him, into becoming his disciple. When Jen finally asks, "Is it the sword or me you really want?" I was glad the movie acknowledged the force of his attraction to her.

Jen is involved in the rest of the love stories, usually as the one who breaks a heart. The love affair I cared about most involved Jen and Lo, a bandit living in the western desert whom Jen pursues because he steals her comb. "I'm not big or tall, but I'm quick as the wind" he tells Jen, and he could add that he's charming, funny and fairly gentlemanly--Henry Tilney residing in a cave rather than Northanger Abbey. But Jen is no more faithful to him than she is to her house maid/martial arts instructor Jade Fox or to her adopted sister Shu Lien.

Aside from Jen, the characters seem to have motivations that are not only simple but simplistic. Jade Fox (Chen Pei Pei) seeks esoteric knowledge because she is bad and wants to be able to defy social convention and kill those who thwart her; Li Mu Bai is good because he follows the rules and wants to kill Jade Fox. Yu Shu Lien is good because she is patient, long-suffering and honors the memory of her dead fiance; Yu Jen is bad because she doesn't even honor her living fiance--well, that doesn't quite make her bad, but her willingness to steal, lie, and break promises isn't quite enough to make her bad, either. She gets to be not quite good or bad, but it seems that the main reason for that might simply be that she's young and pretty.

Other elements of the movie offer more rewards. Like the rest of Lee's work, Crouching Tiger is beautifully filmed, gorgeous to look at. The fight scenes are amazing, energetic and inspiring dances precisely choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the expert responsible for designing the similarly remarkable acrobatics in The Matrix. It's rare that anyone die in these fights scenes--Jade Fox is the only character evil enough to actually kill someone else--so you can enjoy them for the athletic prowess (and flying ability) of the combatants. Virtually every fight involves Jen, who usually wins. Especially notable is her handiwork, footwork and swordplay as she takes on an entire tavernful of tough guys, one or two or six at a time, defeating them all, leaving them with broken bones or missing teeth but steady pulses.

I was told I'd love this movie, and I wanted to. After all, it's in Chinese, most of the main characters are women, it's up for Best Picture and it isn't Gladiator. But I didn't love it. I thought it was OK. I don't feel I wasted either the price of the ticket or the time required to see it, but I was disappointed. I could see the crouching--or maybe it was cowering?-- horse-horse-tiger-tiger, but the hidden dragon stayed far too hidden.

Posted by holly at 8:01 AM | Comments (1)

September 24, 2006

Appropriately Instructive Movies about the Power of Art

A friend recently emailed me and asked me for suggestions for movies he might show in his composition course, which includes some essays on art--from what I know of the reader our composition department uses, I'm guessing Aristotle's Poetics and the like. He didn't ask me specifically for movies that are about the power of art--rather, he specified that he wanted movies "the artistic powers of which are slightly better than what the students are used to. Yet I don't want to bore them either."

But that didn't matter because I read the message wrong at first--it was first thing in the morning and I was tired--and spent a couple of hours trying to think up movies about the power of art which would please an audience of 18-year-olds.

Two of my favorite movies about the topic--actually, two of my favorite movies, period--are Babette's Feast (in Danish with English subtitles, rated G) and Cinema Paradiso (in Italian with English subtitles, and only a little bit sexy), and it is my unfortunate experience that 18-year-olds don't tend to love subtitles.

There are plenty of movies--particularly of a certain era--about the power of movies and performance: Singin' in the Rain, perhaps, or All About Eve, or Sunset Boulevard. SitR is also one of my favorite movies but I realize not everyone likes musicals (although I also realize that not liking musicals is both a character flaw and a moral failing). I adore All About Eve but some people dismiss it as a chick movie. Sunset Boulevard might be a good choice.... I let students make up missed quizzes and such by watching movies and they consistently remark that SB knocks them out, and they also like knowing where the line "I'm ready for my close-up" comes from.

Another really great movie about the power of movies All About My Mother but it's got that subtitle thing again. And it's really good, but it's a downer--it's one of the few Almodovar movies I really don't want to see again.

In the right mood I might argue that Strictly Ballroom is a movie about the power of art.... but it might also be a movie a fair number of them have seen, since its director, Baz Luhrmann, also directed that nasty business Moulin Rouge.

Then there are always biopics of artists, Frida and the like--there are dozens of those. I can't think of any good biopics of writers at the moment except for Wilde, and the focus of that is the destruction wrought in his life by Bosie. Though that does remind me of a very old black and white version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is about the power of art....

So anyway, I don't very often poll my readers, but I'm asking for your help. I realize I'm framing this question in a way my friend didn't, but I figure, why not illustrate more than one point with the film he shows? So if you can think of a good movie about the power of art--or if you can remember seeing a movie when you were 18 that really knocked you out--please share.

Posted by holly at 6:46 PM | Comments (15)

September 4, 2006

Lizzy Tudor in Film

Recently I watched two different two-part versions of the life of Elizabeth Tudor. The first was the 2005 HBO mini-series Elizabeth I, starring Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons (both of whom I always like to watch), and the second was the 2005 Masterpiece Theatre mini-series The Virgin Queen, starring Anne-Marie Duff, a young Irish actress who was also in The Magdalene Sisters. Helen Mirren was WAY better. (I have every certainty that she deserved the Emmy she won for this role.) She is regal to begin with and the character as written for her was much wittier, wiser, more powerful. In the Duff version, there were scenes where the queen was mocked and ridiculed, and it was easily done because there was something ridiculous about her character, and something ridiculous about a 30-something woman playing a 60-something crone (and Duff's portrayal WAS a crone).

When I first moved to the town I live in now, I went to check out the public library and what it had to offer. A librarian tried really hard to sell me on their facilities for genealogical research. "I had a bunch of great aunts who traced the family way back," I said. "There's not much more to be done unless someone wants to go look at tombstones and read parish records in rural Germany or France."

"Oh," the librarian said, smiling. "Don't underestimate what we have to offer, especially now that libraries are link. You'd be surprised."

"No, you'd be surprised," I said. "Those great aunts of mine were hard-core Mormons."

The librarian lost her smile and nodded. She knew, as anyone who does genealogical research knows, that the Mormons are the most diligent and thorough genealogists in the world.

I mention this because it's one reason I have always had an interest in the British monarchy: those great aunts established that among my ancestors are Wicked King John (who signed the Magna Carta) and William the Conqueror (a.k.a. William the Bastard, Norman invader of England). It's not like I claimed an affinity for royalty or liked to imagine I could have been a princess; rather, I was fascinated to think of my ancestors living in drafty stone castles, galloping through dappled forest in hot pursuit of wild bore, begetting scores of illegitimate children and watching a guy in a hat with bells on it strum the lute. Starting in junior high I read about them a lot; among my royal ancestors, my favorite is Eleanor of Aquitaine (played by Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter).

Elizabeth Tudor (who is neither my ancestor nor even my relative) is my favorite monarch and one of my favorite historical figures of all time, in large part because she was a fiery-tempered, strong-willed, intelligent spinster, and I have always claimed an affinity for those. I admit I could never understand how anyone could sympathize with that shallow milktoast Mary Queen of Scots, and my interest in Elizabeth made her mother, Anne Boleyn, sympathetic to me too. I was never a huge fan of Liz's father, Henry VIII--how could I be, given the way he treated his wives?--and I was always glad the Earl of Essex didn't succeed in fomenting a rebellion. I just wish the whole big story didn't involve so many people getting their heads chopped off.

I watch every version of Elizabeth's life I come across. I liked the Cate Blanchett movie Elizabeth because it had Cate Blanchett in it, and saw it a couple of times, but it took so many liberties with facts and accuracy that I couldn't really respect it. (Plus it has Geoffrey Rush in it, and he flat creeps me out.) It's been a while since I saw the 1971 BBC six-part mini-series starring Glenda Jackson, but as I remember, Jackson was awesome! I'm kind of sated as far as "The Life if Liz" goes, but maybe in a few months I'll watch it again and see how it compares to the Mirren version. (Especially since I just discovered that the actress who plays Mary of Scotland is named Vivian Pickles.)

So here are my recommendations: If you like elaborate costume dramas, all these versions of Elizabeth's life have their merits, but I'd start with Helen Mirren. Then Glenda, then Anne-Marie, then Cate, and if you really want to go all out, there's always the Bette Davis version, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. But I'd definitely save it for last.

Posted by holly at 11:45 AM | Comments (7)

August 23, 2006

Just As God Made Her

Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought Season II of Veronica Mars, just as I said I would, and watched about as much as I could stand before my eyeballs started to itch. One thing I'm fascinated by is what a big deal Kristen Bell's small tits are this season.

Not a lot was made of the topic the first season, though one of my very favorite exchanges referenced the subject: Veronica has discovered that someone has let the air out of one of her tires. New guy and love interest "boy toy Troy" (as he is referred to by Logan Echolls) squats beside her as she struggles with lug nuts and asks, "Flat?"

"Just as god made me," she replies.

And the conversation goes on from there.

But in Season II, there are plenty of references to how "not busty" Veronica is. First she's humiliated on some local access TV show because she used (without results, apparently) some breast enlargement cream. Then there are references to how she doesn't need any plastic surgery "except the obvious,"as one creepy dude puts it, the obvious being breast implants. Then some "big-tittied bitch" (a phrase I borrow from Sandra Bernhard, fyi, in case it offends you) tells her she should get a tattoo on her chest "so people will have something to look at there."

And that's only in the first two disks, with four more to go.

Oh. There's also a dream sequence (the dreamer is male) where Bell is wearing some massively padded push-bra underneath some fishnet affair of a top. I don't think I would have noticed how artificially enhanced her boobs were in that scene if I hadn't been reminded over and over that if I saw her "just as god made her," she wouldn't have needed underwire for support.

One of the projects I'm supposedly working on is a book about "embodiment," aspects of which include (for me) life-threatening illness, menstruation, anorexia, getting a tattoo, going gray while I've still got really long hair I refuse to cut (everyone so often someone tells me you're not allowed to have long hair if it's gray), and being flat chested. I'm not so flat chested that if you saw me naked you'd mistake me for a guy, but I am flat enough that even when I'm 80, I will never have to worry about my tits sagging.

At some point (a fairly late point in my life, as a matter of fact), it finally sunk in for me that there a lot of songs by men about how great big asses are ("Fat-Bottomed Girls," "Baby Got Back," "Big Ol' Butt," "Big Bottom" [admittedly, a joke song from from Spinal Tap] to name only a few), but not that many songs about the joys of big tits. (If you know of one, please share the title. Also if you know of an "I Love Big Asses" song I've neglected to mention, please let me know.) Perhaps that's because breasts are so important that they don't need any additional musical praise. Or perhaps it's because... well, actually, as I tried to consider why there might be more odes to asses than to tits I came up with some reasons that distressed me, and I don't really want to go there.

But I do have more to say on this topic, so check back later.

Posted by holly at 3:52 AM | Comments (5)

August 2, 2006

Brokeback Mountain

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post, more on what I want to discuss at Sunstone this year. This is a topic I've already explored on my blog, in entries entitled Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, and The Exclusive Terroritory of Straight Men.

It ain't gonna be pretty, that's for sure.

Over Christmas I went to see Brokeback Mountain with Saviour Onassis while we were both in Arizona for the holidays. I was staying with my sister, who is both a dutiful Mormon who avoids R-rated movies, and a devoted and knowledgeable fan of good cinema. She knew she wouldn't be seeing the movie, but she wanted to hear all about it when I got home. "Is it really as good as they say?" she asked.

"It really is," I said. "Heath Ledger is amazing. He deserves an Oscar." (He was robbed, by the way. So was Jake.) "He reminded me of some of our cousins," I told her. "He does a thoroughly convincing job of playing a taciturn western cowboy."

"I hear both characters have wives," she said.

"Yes," I said. "And that's one of the things I liked about the movie: all the characters are treated with respect and sympathy. The wives aren't the focus of the movie but they're not neglected, either. The situation does incredible damage to the women, but they're not treated as acceptable casualties. Anne Hathaway's personality becomes as brittle as her bleached hair, while Michelle Williams--oh, it's just heartbreaking."

"Well," my sister said emphatically, banging pots around as she emptied her dishwasher, "it's great that they portrayed it well, but the situation itself is not OK. These guys have got to stop marrying women."

"You looking for an argument?" I asked. "I was engaged to a gay man, remember? I don't think gay men should marry straight women, either."

"They've got to stop," she repeated. "They've got to stop hiding behind wives. It's not fair to use women like that."

"I couldn't agree more," I said. "And it's a time-honored practice with a name, in case you didn't know: marrying someone of the opposite sex for the purpose of passing for straight is called ‘having a beard,' and I think there should be no more beards. But I also think that if you want gay men to stop marrying straight women, one good way of helping that happen is to let them marry each other." She made no reply to that--as a Mormon Republican, what could she say?--but she at least nodded.

Posted by holly at 5:10 PM | Comments (6)

May 31, 2006

The Best Home Teaching Story I've Ever Heard

He went out and drank a quart of peppermint schnapps.... He ripped all my clothes off, he started to beat me with the cat furniture.... And I left him. And that's when he jumped out the kitchen window.

I just heard those lines of dialogue in a movie--and not just any movie, but a documentary about a Mormon temple worker. One of the reasons I so love nonfiction is that you just can't make shit that weird up.... OK, you can, but credibility is strained. A Mormon temple worker once drank a quart of peppermint schnapps, ripped his wife's clothes off, beat her with the cat furniture (my favorite detail by far), then tried and failed to commit suicide by jumping out the kitchen window!? (The ellipses in the dialogue, I should mention, represent not anything I have deleted but editing cuts in the film itself.) To paraphrase Aristotle, the only reason something that weird can be believed is because it really happened.

The even weirder thing is, the Mormon temple worker was once a rock star, Arthur "Killer" Kane, a founding member of the New York Dolls. In 1989, as he lay recuperating in the hospital after his failed suicide attempted, Kane called a 1-800 number and requested a copy of the Book of Mormon. Two sister missionaries later showed up at his door and taught him the discussions.

Greg Whiteley, director of New York Doll, met Arthur Kane when he became his home teacher (meaning he was supposed to visit Kane once a month and make sure he was doing OK) in LA a few years ago. He started interviewing and filming Kane, but probably nothing would have come of it if Morrissey hadn't arranged a NY Dolls reunion at Morrissey's Meltdown in London 2004. This reunion was the fulfillment of a dream Kane had cherished for 30 years.

I had to stop this film right after the interview with Kane's estranged wife Barbara (be sure to click on that link for a truly bizarre coda to the whole story) because it shifted to a bunch of Mormon priesthood holders explaining what it's like to receive a witness of the Book of Mormon. I thought about not finishing the film--I was afraid there would be too much Mormon content--but curiosity got the better of me and I watched the rest.

I really liked it. It was a sweet movie, with interesting interviews from Morrissey, Bob Geldof, all kinds of people, and it was touching to see Kane's reunion with David Johansen (a.k.a. Buster Poindexter) and fascinating to watch Kane explain the Word of Wisdom.

The kicker (and this is sort of a spoiler, except that if you've read any reviews or heard anything about the movie in the news, this detail is usually mentioned) is that Kane died of leukemia a mere 22 days after returning from the festival in London--not only that, but he died two hours after he was diagnosed.

And that moved me and I thought, "Oh, how lovely that he saw the completion of this goal before his death; how tragic that he had so little time to enjoy it."

And the credit rolled and the mailman dropped my mail through the door slot and I sort of watched the credits and sorted my mail.

And then the pop song that had accompanied the credits ended and there was David Johansen singing A Poor, Wayfaring Man of Grief (Joseph Smith's favorite hymn) accompanied only by an acoustic guitar in tribute to Arthur and I simply burst into tears and sobbed until I couldn't breathe.

I never cared for that hymn--too slow and too long and too didactic in an earnest, Victorian way--but for some reason Johansen's performance of it was terribly moving, not only because it was a loving tribute to a friend but because... because it reminded me of my own loss, the loss of the church? I don't know. I'll try to figure it out. It's partly the amazing generosity of human beings...? Kane loved both the Church AND his band. And Johansen didn't seem to be judging that hymn; he let himself be moved by it as Kane would have been.

And after about half an hour I calmed down.... And then I went through the bonus material and heard Brian Koonin (I don't know who he is, I just noticed his name on the screen) playing Come, Come Ye Saints, which has always been one of my favorite hymns, and then Johansen sang the final verse, which goes

And should we die before our journey’s through,
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow, too;
With the just we shall dwell!
But if our lives are spared again
To see the saints their rest obtain,
O how we’ll make this chorus swell,
All is well! All is well!

The hymn is about the trek to Utah, which so many of my ancestors undertook.... I couldn't even sit up at that point. I lay on the floor and cried as if my heart had just broken. I'm still crying, to be honest.

If you've seen the movie, I'd like to know what you thought. And if you haven't seen it, watch it and let me know how you react. There will be a presentation on it at Sunstone this year; I'm really looking forward to it. I think this is a movie I need to own.

Posted by holly at 5:04 PM | Comments (19)

April 24, 2006

Monty Python and the Holy GPA

There are many ways in which I'm a hard-ass ball-breaker of a professor--my students assure me of this--but one way in which I'm nice as nice can be is the fact that I allow my students to make up for missed quizzes and minor assignments by watching movies. That's right: for students who are earning passing grades on major assignments like papers, I'll let them compensate for bombed or missed reading quizzes (which I never had as an undergrad 25 years ago, because it was assumed that we'd just actually read the work assigned, and we actually did) by renting a movie. Actually, they can rent not just a single movie but as many movies as they need--for students who aren't total goof-offs, I offer unlimited extra credit (although it only applies to missed quizzes and the like, not for crappy papers, which makes the writers of crappy papers upset) in the form of watching films I deem relevant and worthy. Not only that, but I email them a list of such films owned by the college library, so they don't even have to leave campus to watch these movies if they see fit.

There are many reasons why I do this, most of which involve the fact that it makes my life easier. It makes my life easier when I can tell a student who missed class the day of a pop quiz, "Relax. This doesn't have to have any impact on your semester grade. You can just watch a movie or two to make up for the lost points." It makes my life easier to ask, "How many of you have seen Sunset Boulevard?" and see most of the hands go up. I often invoke great movies as a way of making points about books we're reading, and it's depressing when none of my students have seen something that is both a terrific movie and an important cultural touchstone like A Streetcar Named Desire or When Harry Met Sally....

They need to see this stuff, and if I have to bribe them in order to get them to see it, well, I'll do it! All they have to do is watch the movie, and then "write a brief summary that demonstrates to me that you actually watched the movie instead of cribbing a summary of it off the internet somewhere." And what they often write in such summaries is something along the lines of

I was so bummed when I first started to watch Dr. Strangelove because it's old and in black and white, but before long I really got into it and was surprised at how funny it is. Now I want to see more movies with Peter Sellers.

or

When I first started watching On the Waterfront, I thought I would hate it because it's old and in black and white. I still think the gangsters were kind of lame (Tony Soprano would completely laugh at these gangsters) but I was really glad to know where the "I coulda been somebody! I coulda been a contender" stuff came from. Plus, I totally get the whole Marlon Brando things now! Watching this movie changed my life, because I've never been sure what to major in before, but now I know I want to major in film studies.

That's right: watching a Marlon Brando film for one of my classes changed someone's life. I admit I'm rather pleased by that.

Not all the movies I suggest are in black and white; I also try to find recent movies that are relevant to works we've read, so when we discussed Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong I offered credit for watching The Magdalene Sisters. I offered then EXTRA extra credit (15 points instead of the normal ten) this semester to see Brokeback Mountain, because it was out in theatres and we were reading David Sedaris on what it meant to be gay and because Brokeback Mountain was both really, really good and important. When we read Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal about East Indian culture in Britain, I offered extra credit if they watched Bride and Prejudice.

Recently a very good student came to my office to ask about his quiz grade. I'd given a pop quiz on one of only two days he's been absent this semester, which is why he's getting a B instead of an A in that portion of his grade. He said he'd be happy to watch a movie to improve his grade but was in the mood for "something light." He's a bit older, 28 or 29 instead of 20 or 21, and has both a good work ethic and a really lively mind. Since he wanted something light, I said, "Have you seen any Monty Python?" And he had not.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an extremely bright student who is almost 30 and who has never seen a single Monty Python movie! Is this OK? I submit to you that it is not!

I am giving this student a chance to improve his grade simply by watching Life of Brian or Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

When I taught high school on an Apache Indian reservation, I had the school buy Holy Grail so I could show it to my students--I feel that strongly that they need to be familiar with the cultural references in it--and they freakin' LOVED IT. Not one of them had seen the movie before, but they all got it, and they walked around afterward saying, "It's only a flesh wound" and "‘Can't I have just a little bit of peril?' ‘No, the peril is too perilous.'"

How can you go through life not having seen The Holy Grail? It's unthinkable. But there will be people on this planet who have seen this movie because of ME. And on certain nights when I can't sleep, I remember that fact, and it calms me.

Posted by holly at 9:38 AM | Comments (9)

April 5, 2006

Well Below Prime

A couple of weeks ago I received Prime, starring Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep, in the mail from Netflix. A few days later Reese Witherfork mentioned that she was trying to get through this movie but found it boring, disappointing and "too Hollywood." Because RW is pretty freakin' astute, this assessment was enough to transform the mild anticipation I felt about the movie into vague apprehension, but as I am nothing if not dutiful, and as I eventually ran out of other things to watch, I finally put the damn movie in the dvd player, only to discover that Ms. Witherfork was right, and then some.

This movie is dreadful for so many reasons, but I'll list a few of the worst.

1. Everyone remarks repeatedly on how unusually charming and funny the male lead is, but he never says a single truly charming or funny thing.

2. The male lead has a best friend who behaves so repulsively that he can never get a second date with a woman. After he insults a woman to the point that she refuses to see him ever again, he waits a few days, drives to a bakery, buys a cream pie, then drives to her home and throws it in her face. This is played for laughs.

3. The character played by Uma says completely stupid things to her therapist. For instance, after this 37-year-old shiksa goes to bed with this 23-year-old member of the tribe, she tells said therapist how great the sex is (the joke being that the therapist realizes that she is the mother of this hot young stud). Much to the therapist's dismay, the hot divorcee elaborates--something to the effect of, "This is a weird thing to tell your therapist, but I'm too embarrassed to tell anyone else this. This guy has the most perfect penis."

Well! And this from a woman with a whole coterie of hip gay friends. I admit I am hag to only two fags, and it's been a while since I've been in therapy. Still, it seems to me that if you've got a slew of gay BFF's, you tell THEM how great your boyfriend's penis is--for one thing, they might be interested, if somewhat skeptical. They're among the people most likely to ask for details.

4. The juvenile nature of the male characters, the fact that the male lead is so great in the sack and the fact that the movie is written and directed by some young nobody makes it easy to imagine a really annoying scenario explaining how the movie was made: some young guy is thinking about how great it would be if he could bang some hot 30-something actress like Halle Berry/ Uma Thurman/ Nicole Kidman--then asks himself how he could possibly seduce HB/ UT/ NK, only to realize he could pull it off thanks to his wit, charm and perfect dick, of course! Then he remembers that his mother would be completely horrified, so he could never tell her....but what if she found out anyway? Hey, that's a great plot for a movie!!

5. The dialogue is so unexceptional and the pace so slow that after the first 20 minutes I kept hitting fast-forward. I'd stop if it looked like there was any real conflict or character development, which wasn't that often--and when I did slow the dvd player to normal speed, what I saw was so plodding and predicable that I still could tell exactly what was going on--as well as guess what would happen next. The movie was 100 minutes long, but I managed to watch the whole thing in half that time.

6. However, the most upsetting thing about this movie is the shame it arouses--that's right, shame: shame at watching Meryl Streep's degradation. One of the finest actresses of our day has been reduced to playing an incredibly annoying role in an incredibly annoying movie. It's enough to break your heart, and not in a Deer Hunter kind of way.

Long story short: avoid this movie! It is prime shit, and it will wound and depress you.

Posted by holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (6)

March 7, 2006

Movies I Love, Movies I Hate

In honor of Sunday night's Academy Awards, here's a list of movies I love, followed by a list of movies I hate.

Movies I love:

All About Eve, Babette's Feast, The Best Years of Our Lives, Bride and Prejudice, Casablanca, Cinema Paradiso, Diva, Dr. Strangelove, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, From Here to Eternity, Guys and Dolls, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Igby Goes Down, Lawrence of Arabia, The Manchurian Candidate (1962 version), Mary Poppins, Network, On the Waterfront, (all six hours of the 1995 version of) Pride and Prejudice, Pride of the Yankees, The Quiet Man, The Seventh Seal, Sid and Nancy, Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Strictly Ballroom, Thoroughly Modern Millie, The Unbelievable Truth, Without You I'm Nothing, Zorro the Gay Blade.

I like old movies and will watch (almost) anything with Jean Arthur, Marlon Brando, Cyd Charisse, Gary Cooper, Irene Dunne, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne.

When I was very young, my favorite movies were Mary Poppins and True Grit.

I dig old musicals (anything by Rogers and Hammerstein, and all kinds of other things as well), old war films (All Quiet on the Western Front, Battleground, The Big Red One, From Here to Eternity, The Longest Day, etc and have no patience with recent war movies like Saving Private Ryan and The English Patient that end up being even more moralistic and simplistic than 1940s films designed to build morale–Casablanca, after all, is a war film, written, filmed and released while World War II was far from decided), old westerns (back when I had cable, I would watch anything with cactus in it, and I dig High Noon, Rio Bravo, Stagecoach, etc--this is not to say I've never seen a bad western, but I'll sometimes watch them just for the scenery).

I'm fascinated by films from the first go-round of Ealing Studios: I'm All Right Jack, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Knack, etc.

Movies I hate:

A Clockwork Orange, Dances with Wolves (I don't care that it came in at 75 in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movies ever--someday the world will recognize what shallow tripe that movie actually is), The English Patient, Last Tango in Paris, MASH, McClintock! (this is the second-worst John Wayne western ever! It's almost as racist and far more sexist than even Red River!) Napoleon Dynamite, Nashville, Quills, Seven, Shakespeare in Love (good god, could they mention that lame joke about "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter" or whatever it was one more time?), Short Cuts, Signs, The Thin Red Line (a.k.a. Forrest Gump Goes to Guadalcanal, a.k.a. The Passion of the Marine), You've Got Mail (like I really want to watch Meg Hanks and Tom Ryan--or whatever their names are--stutter and smirk their way through roles previously played so well by Judy Garland and Van Johnson?)

Half the movies in that list I knew I wouldn't like but someone insisted I see them anyway.

For what that's worth.

Posted by holly at 8:18 AM | Comments (4)

March 6, 2006

The 78th Annual Academy Awards

Six or seven years ago, I asked one of my teachers in grad school if he intended to watch the Oscars. He rolled his eyes in a fabulous gesture of contempt and wrinkled his nose in distaste. "Hardly," he said. "No one in the movie industry would watch an award ceremony about books. I see no reason to support Hollywood's masturbatory ritual of self-aggrandizement."

I could sort of see his point, but the fact of the matter is, I like movies, I like witty acceptance speeches, I like pretty dresses, and I like the Oscars.

I don't mess with other award shows; I tried watching the BAFTAs once but there was too much about stuff I didn't know or care about (though I should point out that this year the British Academy of Film and Television Arts knew better than to nominate Keira Knightley for her dreadful performance as Elizabeth Bennet) and the Golden Globes are just too clearly the imitator for me to get worked up about them. I stick with the Oscars.

I admit I almost didn't watch the Oscars this year; I forgot that my neighbor fixed my TV antenna while he was cat sitting over Christmas break and that I now get ABC. I'm glad I remembered before 8 p.m. last night: I felt this year's ceremony was pretty much worth all three and a half hours I invested in it. I thought Jon Stewart did a perfectly respectable job as host; I hope they have him back again. I especially liked the repeated invocation of film as the art of storytelling, and I was pleased when Larry McMurtry reminded everyone that we need to preserve the culture of the book.

Here are some of my own awards:

Best Acceptance Speech by a Guy: George Clooney, for Best Supporting Actor. I've never actually thought he was all that sexy--not that I found him gross or anything; he just wasn't my type--but last night's funny, thoughtful speech helped me understand his appeal.

Best Acceptance Speech by a Woman: Reese Witherspoon, for Best Actress. I liked what she had to say about June Carter Cash and "trying to matter." I finally figured out part of why I like her so much: she reminds me of my youngest sister. They have similar faces, similar voices, similar mannerisms. I think Reese is a fabulous actress but often shows appalling taste and makes dreadful choices in movies: I consider her more talented than Renee Zellweger, but she too often wastes her time and talents on schlock like Sweet Home Alabama and Legally Blonde II. I haven't seen Walk the Line yet, and I've been told it's not THAT great of a performance, but at least it ain't Just Like Heaven (which I refuse to see despite its being named for a Cure song).

Best Introduction of an Award: Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. I pretty much loathe Robert Altman but it was worth having to watch the montage of his crappy films in order to see Meryl and Lily rif on his movies and what he tries to do in them.

Best Montage: the juxtaposition of real-life individuals with the actors who portrayed them on film. I really love Pride of the Yankees, and when the montage cut from Gary Cooper to the real Lou Gehrig giving the famous speech in which he declares himself one of the luckiest men on earth, I teared right up.

Hottest Movie Star: Uma Thurman. Fabulous dress, fabulous hair, fabulous makeup, fabulous human being. She looked totally hot AND graceful AND classy AND she better win an Oscar one of these days.

Scariest Movie Star: John Travolta. He has the strangest looking head. How do we know he's not really an alien?

Best Use of a Foreign Language: Ang Lee, accepting the award for Best Director, for his bit of Mandarin at the end. I was charmed by his acceptance speech. Sye sye, da jya, indeed! Gungsyi to you as well, Mr. Lee!

Movie I Most Want to See Now Despite Previously Never Having Heard of It: Tsotsi, winner of Best Foreign Language Film, from South Africa. I liked the director's acceptance speech. (To those of you who've seen not only this movie but the other foreign language nominees, what can I say: I live in a backwater these days and don't see many foreign films.)

Biggest "What the Fuck" Moment: "It's Hard out Here for a Pimp," Best Song. By all means, let's celebrate an extended whine about how hard life is for men who exploit women instead of suggesting that they NOT exploit women. (Please see Frankengirl's version, It's Hard out Here for a Non-Pimp.

Best Performance I Probably Still Don't Want to Watch: the clips of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance as Capote did make it seem like he earned the award, but it also made it seem like Capote is a really annoying movie to sit through.

Ugliest Dress: Charlize's, maybe. There were plenty.

Most Appreciated Absence: Thank god Gwyneth Paltrow didn't profane the stage.

Biggest Disappointment: Brokeback Mountain loses to Crash.

See also the analysis provided here by Saviour Onassis, and here and here by Jim.

Posted by holly at 10:32 AM | Comments (9)

February 23, 2006

Reader, I'm Not Sure What Happened

Reese, Frankengirl, Mystic Gypsy, and all types like me, check out this plea from the BBC:

Are you an avid reader of romantic fiction? Has Mr Darcy made you leave your fiancé? Has Mr Rochester, Heathcliff or any other fictional hero changed your love life in a significant way? Does your partner want you to be more like these fictional male heroes?

Silverriver Productions are producing a series of three 60' programmes for the BBC about the history of the romantic novel. Presented by Daisy Goodwin, Reader, I Married Him! will examine the work of Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Margaret Mitchell, Helen Fielding and Catherine Cookson amongst others, looking at how romantic novels have changed the female perception of the ideal man.

In the programmes we want to talk to real men and women whose love lives have been transformed by romantic fiction for better or for worse. We want to speak to the women who have never found their Mr Darcy, as well as the men who feel that they fall short of romantic literary ideals.

If you have an interesting story, please get in touch with Louisa MacInnes on 020 7580 2746 or louisa.macinnes@silverriver.tv with details of your experience and and some method of contacting you.

Posted by holly at 12:54 PM | Comments (13)

February 2, 2006

Balderdash and Piffle

Monday, my friend Matthew the Brit who lives in Brussels left a comment on my entry written In Praise of the C Word, suggesting that we Americans check out this British show Balderdash and Piffle, because it was cool and because Germaine Greer had done a really cool bit on the c word itself. I believed him, but I didn't have time to check it out right away.

Later that day, on campus, I went to consult the Oxford English Dictionary on the etymology of a particular word. (While I really love the multi-volume hard copy, it's much more convenient to use the on-line version--I am lucky to work at an institution that has a subscription to the OED on-line.) And instead of the standard home page, I got something telling me that until February 13, 2006, ANYONE can use the OED, because it's available in conjunction with Balderdash and Piffle.

If you've never looked something up in the OED, do. It's really cool--OK, it's really cool if you're a language geek, but what writer isn't? The entries tell you not only the current meaning, but every meaning a word has ever had, and it lists occurrences of the word throughout history. Part of the mission of the OED is to document a word's first written usage, and to that end, they enlist the help of anyone who reads, to provide them with citations and occurrences.

On the B&P site is a list of words the OED people want help with. The site states:

We're particuarly interested to hear from you on the origins of the following words as no one has yet managed beat the dictionary.

* bog-standard [1983]
* bonk (sexual intercourse) [1975]
* bouncy castle [1986]
* minger [1995]
* moony, moonie [1990]
* mullet* (hairstyle) [1994]
* nerd* [1951]
* phwoar [1980]
* pick'n'mix [1959]
* pop one's clogs [1977]

Or perhaps you can find even earlier evidence on the following list than other Wordhunters have come up with so far?

* Beeb [1967]
* boffin* [1941]
* bomber jacket [1973]
* codswallop* [previously thought to be 1963; antedated to 1959 thanks to Wordhunt]
* Crimble [1963]
* cyberspace [1982]
* cyborg [1960]
* ditsy* [1978]
* dosh* [1953]
* full monty [previously thought to be 1985; updated etymology and evidence from 1982 thanks to Wordhunt]
* gas mark [1963]
* gay (homosexual sense) [1935]
* handbags (at dawn) [1987]
* her indoors [1979]
* jaffa* (cricketing term)
* muller* [1993]
* mushy peas [1975]
* naff* [1966]
* nip and tuck [previously thought to be 1980; antedated to 1977 thanks to Wordhunt]
* nit nurse [previously thought to be 1985; antedated to 1942 thanks to Wordhunt]
* nutmeg* (football use) [1979]
* Old Bill (police) [1958]
* on the pull [1988]
* pass the parcel [previously thought to be 1967; antedated to 1954 thanks to Wordhunt]
* pear-shaped [1983]
* porky [1985]
* posh* [1915]
* ska [1964; updated etymology thanks to Wordhunt]
* snazzy* [previously thought to be 1932; antedated to 1931 thanks to Wordhunt]

OK, the list is pretty thoroughly British--I doubt many Americans know the origins of cricketing terms. But who wouldn't like credit for finding the earliest usage of "mullet"? (Though when I had one such haircut long about 1981 or so, we called it "a bi-level.")

The BBC site also provides links allowing you to (among other things) check out the family tree of the Indo-European language, hear what Anglo-Saxon sounded like, write a poem, play an etymology game, and listen to various regional dialects.

Have fun!

Posted by holly at 9:55 AM

January 31, 2006

Can They Be a Sensible Academy?

I just learned that Keira Knightley got an Oscar nomination for her insipid portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in prd & prjdc! The movie as a whole got FOUR nominations, including art direction (yeah, it was pretty, but that doesn't make up for the lousy script), costume design (again, the clothes were very pretty, but they were NOT authentic--there was one gown Caroline Bingley wore that, while fabulous, was a thoroughly contemporary design), and "music written for a motion picture" (can't say the music made an impression on me).

I shouldn't gripe, I suppose: after all, even though it's watered-down, simplified, prettified Austen.... No, I should gripe. It's a mediocre version of a GREAT novel, and I rather hope Keira Knightley loses.

Posted by holly at 11:41 AM

January 25, 2006

Non-Homophobe Fears Homosexuality Will Hasten Decay of Civilization

A practicing, believing Mormon I've collaborated with on a couple of projects has posted something on his blog about how, although he doesn't think he's a homophobe because he has been friends with gay people and recently drank decaf with a gay man in his own kitchen, still, he's upset about Brokeback Mountain because

there's something about homosexuality that always makes me think of the Roman empire crumbling and stuff like that. It seems to come to a head pretty late in a civilization's decline, By the time it becomes prominent, I think it's equivalent to the bruises you start to see on a piece of overripe fruit. It represents a new, deeper level of decay.

He acknowledges that there are probably

many individuals for whom homosexuality does not seem like a choice. But I think there are as many or more people for whom homosexuality is an option but not a foregone conclusion (in other words, they're in the middle of that 6-point spectrum used to rank homo vs. hetero). I haven't seen [Brokeback Mountain] yet, but I think depictions like this that get people thinking about homosexuality will cause many to go ahead and explore it, whereas they probably never would've if society kept a better cap on it.

He goes on to conclude that

deep down, I'm alarmed. I see more bruises forming on the fruit. I think we're in trouble. To mix in another metaphor, compared to the heterosexual sexual revolution of the '60s, I think the gay movement is like crack cocaine next to pot, in terms of potential to ruin people's lives and upset the right balance of things. (emphasis added.)

Before discussing this further, I want to say that I'm sure there are many individuals for whom homophobia does not seem like a choice. But I think there are as many or more people for whom homophobia is an option but not a foregone conclusion (in other words, they're in the middle of that 6-point spectrum used to rank homophobia vs. tolerance). Having spent 26 years as a practicing Mormon and seen Mormon homophobia in action up close, I think the post by this guy is a perfect example of how religious doctrine that justifies homophobia will cause many people to go ahead and explore it, whereas they probably never would've if society kept a better cap on it.

The author of the post I quote here, for instance, probably started out as a two or a three--more tolerant than not. But years of indoctrination into the Mormon church have helped him become an advocate of one of the most dangerous threats to all humanity: ignorant intolerance dressed in the guise of righteous religion.

Reading the post upset me profoundly, because this is someone I work with, and not only is his message homophobic and bigoted, his logic sucks: he feels justified in announcing his conviction that the gay movement is extreme in its "potential to ruin people's lives and upset the right balance of things"; he expresses openly his dire fears and grievous worries that acceptance of homosexuality will hasten some sort of dangerous, dreadful moral decay--but he rejects the label of homophobe! And this despite the fact that homophobia means "an irrational fear of homosexuality and homosexuals." Given that he proclaims his uh, righteous fears of homosexuality's threat to virtuous, upstanding society, given how overwrought, paranoid and hyperbolic his fears are (what the hell is he doing invoking the fall of the Roman empire? I thought that had to do with putting an emperor in charge of the government, and with the fact that the Goths sacked the capital.... Then there's the fact that the Greeks accepted homosexuality, and they are, after all, the basis for what we in the Western world call civilization), he seems to fit the definition of a homophobe to a rigid, straight H--OK, he's not a virulent, rampaging homophobe, just a mild, meandering one, looking for rotten fruit in the garden of life, blaming the rot on others--god forbid he consider the possibility that HE and his beliefs are responsible for such things.

How can he fail to see that he is a homophobe? Why is he willing to embrace thoroughly homophobic attitudes, but not the label that goes with them? (I do wonder why people are afraid of being labeled a bigot, but not of actually being one. I also wonder why they aren't afraid to reveal such thoroughly inadequate thinking, so that they end up seeming not only bigoted, but unable to follow clear reason.)

I also found the post profoundly ironic, because one of the projects I worked with him on was The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire modeled on The Onion. And when I wrote for the Sugar Beet, I got in a little trouble for a piece I produced to assuage some of the grief and shame I felt when I learned that Aaron McKinney, one of Matthew Shepard's murderers, had grown up Mormon and received officially sanctioned visits from representatives of the Mormon church up until his conviction--at which time the visits ceased and he got excommunicated, because you can't be a convicted felon and a practicing Mormon, any more than you can be an uncloseted homosexual and a practicing Mormon.

I've had people tell me--make that, I've had Mormons tells me--in all seriousness, that homosexuality is a sin akin to murder--and the treatment McKinney received pretty much demonstrates that, at least in the view of the Mormon church, that's true.

And omigod, it's not attitudes like that that will cause the end of civilization! It's not bigotry and greed and vicious illegal wars and wanton devastation of the environment that will destroy the United States--no, it's the fact that there are people in this country who think it's OK to choose a same-sex relationship.

Good god, that is so FUCKED UP.

I'll post the story from the Sugar Beet tomorrow.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (16)

December 17, 2005

prd & prjdc

One night while I was in Belgium, Matt, Leo and I went to see the most recent adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice at the Torsion d'Or (aka the Golden Fleece) in downtown Brussels. The novel is, of course, one of the greatest masterpieces ever composed in any language, and my favorite novel. I've read it at least a dozen times, taught it several times, hope to teach it again. (One of the best courses I ever taught was "All of Austen" at the U of Iowa--it was a blast.)

This adaptation is also titled Pride and Prejudice, but I think this is inappropriate. It should be called prd & prjdc, because it is an abbreviated, overly simplified affair, relying on the hard consonants of major plot points while forfeiting the vowel-like softness of nuance and complexity provided by character development, human growth and discovery.

There are reasons why Austen's novel remains a best seller almost 200 years after it was originally published, why it is read and understood easily even by modern high school students (I first read and loved it as a 15-year-old junior), why it is so often adapted into contemporary works. Bridget Jones's Diary, after all, is based on Pride and Prejudice, and BJD as novel, at least, does a good job of retaining major elements of the plot (not so much in the movie). Then there was Bride and Prejudice, a contemporary retelling set in India, LA and London. It includes a few great Bollywood dance numbers, and is loads of fun--as well as fairly loyal to the plot.

One reason for Jane's continued popularity is the fact that her language has aged very well. Austen's prose, while intellectually and syntactically complex, precise in vocabulary and laden with humor both understated and overt, is spare on similes and metaphors. S&M are, of course, evocative, and make for richness and beauty, but they only work if you understand both the literal and connotative meanings of the objects on each side of the comparison--otherwise, they inhibit rather than augment one's understanding of what's being evoked--"ox-eyed Athena" springs to mind.

But of course the main reason Austen remains popular is that she's a fabulous storyteller with keen insight into human psychology. And that keen insight is precisely what this new adaptation lacks.

In the original novel, Fitzwilliam Darcy, a haughty, disagreeable and exceedingly rich young gentleman of 28 discovers to his mortification that he is smitten with Elizabeth Bennet, a good-natured, intelligent, relatively poor 20-year-old gentlewoman with a bunch of boorish relatives. She's not conventionally pretty enough to appeal his tastes at first (a fact he announces loudly enough for her to overhear him), and she's too willing to express unconventional opinions to suit his sense of what a woman should be. But later he finds himself for some reason captivated by her "fine eyes," resolves to learn more of her, and as he observes firsthand her intelligence, her generosity, her courage, he falls head over heels in love with her.

Meanwhile Elizabeth has developed a fervid fancy for a ne'er-do-well named George Wickham, a hot young thing who drives all the ladies mad with his gallant manners and the sad, sad tales of how he was wronged by the nasty, dishonorable Mr. Darcy. Given how smitten she is with Georgy-Porgy, given how Darcy insulted her looks, given how taciturn and unpleasant Darcy invariably is, Elizabeth has to work even to maintain basic civility in her dealings with him.

But Darcy, reading her brittle politeness as interest in him because it flatters his vanity to do so, eventually proposes marriage to her, telling her that she must put him out of his misery and agree to marry him, even though she is decidedly inferior to him in status and connexions, and that he loves her against his will, his reason and his character. Even after she refuses this less-than-flattering offer of his hand, he believes that she rejects him primarily because he has wounded her vanity "by [his] honest confession of the scruples that long prevented [his] forming any serious" design on her.

Elizabeth struggles to retain her composure and her temper as she replies, "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner...You could not have made me the offer of you hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it."

Darcy is mortified and astonished that anyone would dare to FORM such an opinion of him, let alone express it, but he remains silent as Elizabeth continues:

From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.

But this abhorrence of Darcy is softened and abridged, if not outright removed from the new adaptation, having been replaced with what my friends both pointed out was an "undeniable sexual attraction" between Darcy and Elizabeth. Furthermore, instead of taking place in the drawing room of the Collins' home, as it does in the book, the proposal scene in the movie occurs outside in the rain, with Darcy and Elizabeth so moved by each other's physical presence that they very nearly kiss, even after insulting each other.

Make no mistake: the novel Pride and Prejudice is full of sexual attraction, and Austen makes it clear that a good marriage needs to have a healthy dose of it to succeed. But Elizabeth is not the least bit sexually attracted to Darcy at that point: she has the hots for Wickham, and her attraction for that sexy little bad boy was one reason she is so repulsed--physically, emotionally and intellectually--by Darcy. But oh yeah, Elizabeth's crush on Wickham has been deleted from the new movie too.

Austen also makes clear that in her view of things, sexual attraction must be supported and maintained by a healthy intellectual and emotional attraction: Mr. Bennet, after all, married a girl he was sexually attracted to, only to discover that she was an idiot with whom he could never have a meaningful conversation. And so that marriage could give no lasting pleasure to either partner in it--in fact, it becomes a source of great unhappiness, not only to the two spouses, but to the children it produced.

One of the reasons the novel is so satisfying is that both of the main characters change; both discover their weaknesses and become better people by interacting with the other. John Stuart Mill describes marriage as a relation where "there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them--so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development." That's what you get in the novel Jane Austen wrote, and it occurs precisely because the two partners in the (eventual) marriage are able to recognize and act upon valid critiques of their behavior from the other.

For instance, Darcy's letter, in which he explains his dealings with Wickham and his interferences in Bingley's intentions towards Jane, allows Elizabeth to admit to herself that

Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. --Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.

After inadvertently encountering Darcy at Pemberly and seeing how he has changed because of her, Elizabeth begins "to comprehend that he was exactly the man, who, in dispositions and talents, would most suit her." Months later, when Darcy finally manages to make Elizabeth the offer of his hand in a way she is willing to accept, he says, of his earlier attempt,

The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you believe in a more gentleman-like manner.' Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;--though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.... I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.... I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit....I was spoiled by my parents, who...allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared to my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You have taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.

BUT THAT'S GONE FROM THE FREAKIN' LOUSY NEW MOVIE! In it, Darcy never owns up to making any mistakes; he's always just this great guy this skinny impertinent girl doesn't have the sense to appreciate. His "pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased" were never insufficient, and Elizabeth's final conversation with her father makes that clear: she goes on and on about how she misunderstood him, how they all misunderstood him! She learns nothing about herself, aside from the fact that she's really lucky to have this fabulous hunky rich guy in love with her. I could scarce keep my countenance....wait a minute: I didn't even bother to TRY to keep my countenance: at that point I scowled fiercely and flipped off the screen.

I admit that I preferred Brenda Blethyn's performance as Mrs. Bennet to Alison Steadman's horrible rendering of the character--Mrs. Bennet is supposed to be a ditzy, annoying airhead, but I couldn't stand how shrill and brittle she was in the 1995 mini-series, especially when contrasted to Benjamin Whitrow's witty, dry, understated performance as Mr. Bennet. (I don't consider the performance of Mr. Bennet in the new version interesting enough to warrant mentioning the name of the actor who played him.) Judi Dench was something to behold as Lady Catherine de Bourgh: the audience gasped when she first appeared on screen. But there was so little to the role as it was written--I would bet Ms. Dench spent longer in hair and make-up than she did learning the lines or preparing for the role, because an actress of her caliber could master that particular part in her sleep.

And in my opinion, there is not praise enough in the world to do justice to Julia Sawalha's energetic, rollicking, scene-stealing performance as Lydia in the 1995 version! Wan little Jena Malone, who managed to do just fine as the pregnant Christian in Saved!, provides a Lydia who is overwhelmingly forgettable and insipid. (which I guess doesn't matter since Wickham's part is so stunted and curtailed that her elopement with him doesn't have the force or significance it should.)

I suppose I should say something about the principals.... Keira Knightley bugs--at least, she bugs me. I admit I was glad when I heard she was named Britain's Sexiest Woman, (even sexier than Sienna Miller) because she's not exactly big-breasted, and as someone else whose assets aren't all on her chest, I am happy when women are recognized as devastatingly sexy even when they lack gigantic mammary glands. But Knightley, to borrow the criticism Darcy offers of Jane, "smiles too much." And she doesn's just smile: she does these weird things to her mouth: bites her lip; starts to smile, stops, then goes ahead and smiles; smirks. She can be charming, sure: but she lacks the obvious intelligence and thoughtfulness of someone like Claire Danes, which I think are necessary to play Elizabeth. (Claire Danes is who I would have liked to see in the part--if it had been better written, that is.)

As for Matthew MacFadyen, I liked him well enough in MI5 (known as Spooks in the UK), but I didn't think he was a good Darcy. (I admit I watched MI5--and everything else MacFadyen has been in--about a year ago so I could speculate about what kind of Darcy he might make.) He seemed to think he was playing Heathcliff.... He never commanded my attention on the screen. I could say to myself, "Oh, yeah, the heroine's love interest is back; I should probably pay attention to this interaction," but I would have been just as happy to look at something else.

Then there's the matter of the ending. The version I saw in Brussels ended with Mr. Bennet's command that "If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure." But I've been told that the version released in the US ends with some cheesy post-nuptial discussion about what Darcy should call Elizabeth, a discussion culminating in her declaration that he should address her as "Mrs. Darcy" only when she is at her happiest. I cannot but be grateful that I was spared seeing that.... I shudder to think of it.

In my opinion, credit for the fabulousness of the 1995 version goes to Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay. I would gladly drink this guy's bathwater... I'll watch anything he signs his name to. He has written plenty of adaptations of meaty British novels, including truly amazing versions of Middlemarch and Moll Flanders. His adaptations are always LONG, as in four or five or six hours: he devotes the time and care necessary to translate a 300-page novel into a fairly faithful film.

However, Deborah Moggach, the writer of the new version, should have her computer taken from her until she promises not to write any more trite, superficial shit.

For more analysis of the movie, check out two posts by FrankenGirl: Pride and Prejudice Publicity: Gender, Glamor, Sex and Film: Pride & Prejudice 2005 (I’m not proud. I’m just misunderstood.)

If you're a Janeite, you should see this movie, because Janeites want to know how Jane's work lives in the modern world. The movie isn't vile, exactly, just profoundly inferior to the source material. If you're not a Janeite, you might want to see this movie because you might not care how inferior it is to the original, and I have heard from enough people who don't know the original well and liked this a lot to believe that it might be OK in and of itself--and I readily admit I can't watch it that way, because I'm far too invested in the novel. But don't buy it, or anything like that: buy the 1995 (UK release date) mini-series, and Bride and Prejudice, and oh yeah, the book! Don't forget the book.

Posted by holly at 8:24 AM | Comments (11)

December 6, 2005

A Movie I Won't See

I remember disliking The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis when I read them in fifth grade, though I dutifully made my way through all but the last book in the series of seven: the elementary school librarian, whom I trusted thoroughly, assured me that they were required "great" children's literature, and I wanted to read all such great works. But at some point I just couldn't stomach any more--I found Lewis's books creepy and preachy and mean, and they got worse as the series went on. It was largely because of those books that I was reluctant to read anything else by Lewis: in high school I steered clear of The Screwtape Letters; in college I ignored what he had to say about Mere Christianity.

This review from The Guardian of Disney's new adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, describes some of the things I had the sense to be bothered by, even as a ten-year-old.

The headline reads, "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion;" the review concludes

So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

Pretty much.

Posted by holly at 6:42 AM | Comments (2)

November 7, 2005

I Don't Take Candy from Children, But I Also Don't Hand it Out

I confess: I've never been visited by the spirit of the Great Pumpkin. I've written here and here about various Halloween costumes I've worn, but I admit that dressing up is the only part of the holiday I care for. The whole ghosts and goblins thing doesn't appeal to me: I have never enjoyed being frightened out of my wits, and I don't see the entertainment value of skeletons, corpses and ugly witches. Nor can I see the point in wasting a perfectly good pumpkin by carving a design in it, inserting a lit candle, and putting it outside where it will attract bugs and fractious adolescent boys.

Then there's the whole trick-or-treat business. I have a highly developed, demanding and discriminating sweet tooth, and most of the candy handed out on Halloween does not meet my standards. With the possible exception of the Easter candy Peeps, I don't think a more disgusting candy exists than that vile candy corn. I remember seeing someone once who had painted her nails to resemble that candy corn; that's what the candy reminds me of now--it tastes like I imagine sweetened nail clippings would. I do not particularly care for peanuts or peanut butter, so I am not fond of Snickers or Reese's Cups, and I HATE peanut M&M's. I like hard candy in small and occasional doses. I can be happy eating a KitKat or plain M&M's or any flavor of Skittles, but what I really like is gourmet dark chocolate. Unfortunately, not many people hand out Godiva Truffles on Halloween.

I am sure you are saying: Holly, you are TOO OLD to go trick-or-treating--this holiday is not about what YOU like! Well, OK, but I used to go trick-or-treating, and I was often disappointed by the candy I got as a child. And even now, I have to BUY the damn candy, and I'm not going to buy candy I don't like--what if I end up with leftovers? And it's freakin' expensive to buy all that candy! I rather like the idea of being generous to other people's children, but I'm not sure doling out lollipops to anonymous wee ones is the best way to do it. I'd rather sign up to buy Christmas gifts for an underprivileged child--now there's a holiday and a practice I understand.

All of which is to say, a mere day or two before Halloween I still had not found the time or wherewithall to buy any candy or drape any part of my home in cobwebs or orange and black streamers. I was thinking about turning off the lights in the front of my house and hiding out in the back bedroom all evening so that I would not have to open my door to a steady stream of diminutive Disney princesses and Harry Potter look-alikes, when a friend said to me, "Want to see a movie Monday night so we don't have to deal with trick-or-treaters?"

What a glorious idea! We went to the 5:30 showing of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (which I heartily recommend). The cineplex was nearly deserted, which is precisely how I like my cineplexes. Then we got dinner; then we went home. I was back in my house between 8:30 and 9 p.m. and at that point the kiddies were back home as well, sitting on their beds in their costumes, exulting over their hoards of candy plundered under threat of malfeasance from obliging adults, completely jacked up on sugar and crying because they didn't want to put on their pajamas and have their faces scrubbed free of makeup. But I didn't have to deal with any of that!

So now I know what I'm going to do every Halloween. I can't think of a better time to see a movie. As for staying home, opening my door to short strangers and handing out candy? I'd rather indulge in my own little trick, my own little treat.

Posted by holly at 7:47 AM | Comments (0)

November 1, 2005

Phone Chips and Salsa

Several weeks ago, Wayne and I had phone chips and salsa, which is a lot like phone sex except with chips and salsa in place of the sex. (That's probably pretty self-evident, but I wanted to make sure everyone understood.)

That is only one of the many activities we have shared over the phone. We have also scrubbed our bathtubs together. We have gone for walks. We have plotted and taken fiendish but heartily deserved revenge against Adam, my evilest of exes. We have washed dishes. We have done laundry. We have googled our celebrity crushes and directed each other to websites featuring photos of obscure foreign actors without their shirts.

In fact, I got a cell phone a mere 14 months ago largely to facilitate talking to Wayne. He was very upset about a $400.00 phone bill he got, especially since most of the charges involved phone calls to or from me. So I got the same carrier he had and we both signed up for free mobile-to-mobile minutes, with the upshot that I began spending 25 to 30 hours a month talking to Wayne on the phone, and about two and a half hours put together talking to everyone else I knew.

That kept up for a good long while until we had a falling out over religion. I may discuss our six-month estrangement and reconciliation at some point in a future post, but let me say now that within days of reestablishing contact all the animosity disappeared and it was like we'd never quarreled, except that it took us a while to work back up to talking on the phone for so long that we'd grow peckish and have to rummage through our various cupboards for snacks.

After we both closed up the bag of chips and put the salsa back in the fridge on that Saturday several weeks back, we decided we needed some internet action, so we blog surfed by hitting the "next blog" button on blogger. We came across a site run by some guy in Vienna dedicated to enormous breasts. He provided plenty of photos of breasts, including a substantial pair on a naked blonde woman who sits on a fireplace mantle, drinking a beer and looking bored while some guy eats her out. I found that in rather bad taste, but what upset Wayne was a photo further down the page of Christian Bale from American Psycho, accompanied by a lavish and loving paean to the character CB portrays: the guy went on and on about how that was his favorite movie and how he really identified with that character--the one who tortures, rapes and murders women.

The thing is, earlier in the conversation, while he was cleaning his kitchen I was tromping through this small wooded area near my house, Wayne had said to me, "So, I read that article you linked on your blog, the one about ‘Die, Women, Die!' and it really kind of bugged me. I couldn't trust it."

"Why?" I asked.

"The tone bugged me. There was this cheap shot about Desperate Housewives, and it makes it sound like the show is just about 40-something T&A. But it's not--it's so much more than that. So the whole article just seemed to have--"

"A feminist agenda?" I interrupted.

"Exactly," he said, "and I don't trust agendas."

"Everyone has an agenda," I said. "It's just that they can be more or less explicit, more or less offensive, more or less progressive."

"Well, I just don't see why someone needs to prove their agenda by knocking Desperate Housewives. It's a great show."

(Unfortunately I couldn't comment on that particular issue at that point, as I had never seen an episode of DH. I have now seen eight episodes, and have been surprised at how much I like it--but more on that later.)

"I think it's a good point and a good article," I said. "There are so many shows that feature violence against women. The article makes the point that not only are these shows most popular among males age 18-34, but these shows are about the only television programming that demographic group really likes to watch."

"But I'm a male between the ages of 18-34," he began.

"Yes, but you're not a straight one," I said.

"But I watch Desperate Housewives," he said.

"Do you watch CSI?" I asked.

"Of course not. I don't watch most of the crap on television. And if you started examining the crap on television, you'd see that almost all of it insults someone."

"But that's not necessarily the same thing as trying to titillate someone by depicting the violent rape, torture and murder of women," I said. "Why should that kind of suffering be entertainment? Why would anyone enjoy watching that?"

(I admit I honestly don't understand that, but then, I have never been able to see anything funny about someone slipping on a banana peel. Even as a small child, I never felt able to laugh because I was too busy thinking about how painful it would be to fall down like that.)

And then the conversation took a turn and we talked about other things for over an hour until we both read the entry about how great that American Psycho character is. "This is obscenely offensive," Wayne said, "because that character is sick!"

So I said, "Do you get it now? Do you see why it's repugnant and abhorrent to have someone identify positively with a character who gets off on brutalizing, degrading and killing women? Do you see why it's not cool to make women convenient objects to be destroyed and discarded as part of a man's exploration of good and evil? Do you see why this sickens and distresses women who come across it?"

And he did--thank goddess.

I haven't unleashed many feminist rants on my blog lately (OK, I haven't unleashed them on the blog, but there have been several in real life), but it seems about time for one. I was going to write something about this Amnesty International Report on Japan's refusal to apologize for enslaving thousand of women as sex slaves, claiming that rape wasn't a war crime until 1949; and about a museum in Japan documenting the lives and suffering of comfort women, but I found an entry on the topic already posted on a blog I really like, I Blame the Patriarchy. So I'll work on drafting some of the ideas I've been mulling over lately, and in the meantime, you can enjoy the insights of another spinster aunt.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)

October 17, 2005

Chocolat

This is a review of the movie Chocolat that I wrote in 2001 for a class on, well, on writing reviews. The teacher liked it but suggested that it was a bit too idiosyncratic to be appropriate for most publications, so I never bothered to do anything with it, but it seems it might find a home here, especially since I posted all this stuff about movies.

****

Once at a party a friend of mine who had been sitting near my television said to me, "I can't believe your movie collection. It's so...brazen."

"You mean ‘cause they're almost all chick movies?" I asked.

"It's not just that," she said. "It's that you have them out, where people can see them. I mean, some of my friends own a lot of these same movies, but they put them away before people come over. But you're not even embarrassed."

It's true: I like chick movies, I watch chick movies, I buy chick movies; I don't care who knows. I might add that my collection is alphabetized, ranging from Annie Hall, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Chasing Amy, Clueless to Sense and Sensibility, Singin' in the Rain, Sixteen Candles, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Truth or Dare. I feel entitled to add that I like other kinds of movies as well--I love Lawrence of Arabia and The Pride of the Yankees, and I don't think those qualify as chick movies. But then, I haven't gotten around to buying those movies. Maybe I should. Nothing in my collection starts with L or P.

Chocolat, directed by Lasse Hallstrom and up for Best Picture in the 2001 Academy Awards, is the best chick movie I have seen in a good long time. First of all, the clothes are terrific. Juliette Binoche and Victoire Thivosol (who plays Binoche's daughter) arrive in a tiny French village at the end of the 1950s dressed in matching red cloaks that would make Little Red Riding Hood jealous. They carry two medium-sized suitcases, but you'd need at least two suitcases more to hold the entirety of Juliette Binoche's marvelous collection of straight skirts, full skirts, cute sweater sets and colorful high heels. I especially loved her bias-cut circle plaid skirts, one of which has really cool patch pockets. When Binoche sets about painting the dingy walls of the patisserie she intends to turn into a chocolaterie, she does so in a fabulous fitted off-the-shoulder purple blouse, and not one drop of paint is spattered on that blouse, which is good because it's really flattering and shows up again and again. I imagine she also has a decent collection of push-up bras in one of those suitcases--at least, I'm guessing she wears one under that purple blouse.

Carrie-Anne Moss, who was so drop-dead cool in black leather and vinyl as Trinity in The Matrix, is here a prim widow who wears elegant suits and pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy. Her mother is played by Judi Dench, and while not all of Dench's costumes are particularly remarkable, she is provided with a very flattering haircut and wide-brimmed hat just in time for her birthday party. Even the mayor's absent wife has a closet full of fabulous clothes--and when the mayor, played by Alfred Molina, takes garden shears to a flowered chiffon party dress because he's angry at his wife for running off and leaving him, I had to suppress a gasp of horror.

Nor are men's fashions ignored. The hair and make-up crew did a wonderful job of adding striking blond highlights to Johnny Depp's dark hair, which he wears pulled back in a severe, straight ponytail. Depp plays a vagabond whose presence threatens the towns tranquility, and he is suitably vagabondish in a ratty leather blazer, fraying sweaters and tattered pants. Alfred Molina looks quite dignified in a series of well-cut suits, and the priest, a curly-headed, doe-eyed, callow actor whose name I forgot to note, gets to wear exceptionally lovely and elaborately embroidered vestments.

The movie is set in France, and while no one actually speaks French in the movie, at least most of the actors--only three of whom are French--speak with French accents. An exception is Johnny Depp, who acquired a fairly awful and unconvincing Irish accent for this film. The French setting means that we get many nice shots of quaint homes and large trees along a slow green river.

I don't want to make it sound like clothes, hair, accents and a picturesque setting are all this movie has to offer. Keep in mind, it's about chocolate. I suggest you bring some with you while you watch this movie. There are lots of scenes of melted chocolate being stirred around in big bowls, and you can get pretty hungry. At one point Lena Olin licks the knife she is using to stir such a pot of chocolate, and while I winced at the unsanitariness of that act--after all, this chocolate is going to be for sale--I couldn't help wishing for a chocolate-covered knife to lick myself.

The movie also has a plot, which I found compelling and moving. It's a story about the cost of self-deprivation and petty intolerance, and the rewards of generosity. One of the things I liked best about this movie was its generous attitude towards its characters. None of them are whole-heartedly bad; all are offered redemption. The fact that redemption arrives in the form of chocolate might seem cloyingly sweet to some viewers, but there was enough darkness and bitterness in this chocolate for me. I'm going to buy it when it comes out on video, even though I already own a couple of movies starting with C.

****

Just for the record, I never got around to buying a copy of Chocolat. Several of the other movies I mentioned are no longer in my collection, because I sold most of my VHS cassettes after I got a dvd player. I now own Lawrence of Arabia on dvd, and watch it regularly.

Posted by holly at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)

October 14, 2005

Heat

Another piece culled from old files, this was written five or six years ago.

I was very depressed last week until Wednesday night, when my friend and former f*ck buddy Sergei came over. I called him because I hadn't heard from him in weeks. He himself was terribly depressed, having just been named "Employee of the Month" at Barnes and Noble, an honor that means he's a responsible grownup who must renounce all claims to being a hip, cool bad boy. Since we were both depressed, we decided to commiserate. He showed up with a bottle of tequila and Heat, this long Al Pacino movie, because there's a scene featuring the very Heckler and Koch assault rifle he owns (and which I fired one day at the shooting range). We watched the movie and downed a few shots and he gave me a back rub and then we ended up wrestling and it was just like Ado Annie says: "Every time I lose that wrestlin' match, I have a funny feelin' that I won...." So I have this very attractive man straddling me and pinning my hands to the ground, and all he does is say, "OK, kiss me." So I get one lousy kiss and then he gets up and goes home because after all he has a girlfriend and I don't approve of infidelity.

Posted by holly at 7:57 AM | Comments (2)

October 4, 2005

30-second Movies, with Bunnies

Go here:

http://www.angryalien.com/

They're all good, but I especially liked the 30-second version of Pulp Fiction.

Posted by holly at 1:17 PM

September 26, 2005

I Love Netflix

The first movie I ever got from Netflix was Intolerable Cruelty, the romantic comedy from the Coen brothers, the geniuses who also brought us Raising Arizona and Fargo. It was mailed to me on February 10, 2004, and received back February 23, 2004. I know this because I recently had Netflix email me a record of my entire rental history.

As I've already discussed in Going to the Movies, I love movies and used to see two or three on the big screen each week. But as Norma Desmond noted in Sunset Boulevard, at some point the pictures got small, and while part of me feels I should grieve that development, another part of me absolutely LOVES having dvd's delivered to my house on a regular basis.

It's not merely the convenience of having movies (currently up to three at a time, though for a while I was getting five) delivered to my house. It's also the convenience of being able to watch them whenever I want, while I eat dinner or knit (if it's a movie I like) or open my mail (if it's something I don't like so well). It's never running the risk of late fees. (Not that I ever have to pay late fees, because I'm really organized and alert and always return things on time. Seriously. In my whole life I've had, like, a grand total of half a dozen late fees and library fines, and in the past 15 years, I've had a total of none. Still, I like knowing that I couldn't incur a late fee, even if I tried.) It's also the fact that those other elements make me feel there's room to order things I might not enjoy, but am merely curious about: if I don't really like something after all, well, I just put it back in its sleeve, enclose the sleeve in an envelope, drop the whole thing in the mailbox, and something else will be sent to me in a matter of days.

I love the way you can read or hear about a movie, add it to your queue before it's even released (I do that with all the movies nominated for academy awards) and just wait for it to show up at your house. I also love the way Netflix lets you do serial viewing. Want to see every movie starring Paul Newman available on dvd? Just do a search on him, see what comes up, then add it all to your queue. Want to watch every last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Well, in the case of Buffy, you should actually BUY all seven seasons, but if you aren't quite ready to make that commitment, Netflix will send you every last disk, in order.

I myself did the serial thing with Horatio Hornblower. I've always had a thing for 19th century naval history (and old wooden boats in general--I also have this fascination with Vikings), plus Ioan Gruffudd is just so freakin' hot! After I finished HH, I had Netflix send me his other movies (including the horrid King Arthur, which spelled the end of my crush on Mr. Gruffudd).

If I watch anything at all on my television, it's through Netflix. I got rid of cable over a year ago, and my antenna reception is so awful (I get NBC very badly, and that's it) that I can't even watch regular network television. This is OK with me--in general, I find television very easy to live without.

And yet, I watch at least as many television shows as movies through Netflix, because as I discussed, I discovered at some point that no matter how much bad television exists, there's still all kinds of good stuff out there. I never saw an episode of The West Wing during its regular broadcast, but I watched the first four seasons this summer on disk, which was perhaps not the wisest way to approach the series, because I could get sucked into watching two or three episodes at a time. But at some point I just told myself that I had enough discipline to turn the television off after one episode, and then everything was OK.

I have a particular fondness for British television with some historical element: Foyle's War (a crime show set in Hastings, which is right across the channel from France, during World War II); or historical dramas like The Last King (about Charles II, the guy who finally let women act on the British stage, with Rufus Sewell--who was so fabulous as the hunk in Cold Comfort Farm--in the title role) or Henry VIII (you can figure that one out, played by Ray Winstone) or Longitude, starring Michael Gambon (the guy who got killed in Gosford Park), which tells the true story John Harrison's discovery in the early 18th century of a way to calculate longitude and thus usher in the great era of sea exploration--oh, how I loved that!; or BBC/A&E co-productions of adaptations of old novels like Tom Jones and Ivanhoe (actually I own those), or the BBC/PBS co-productions that show up on Masterpiece Theatre, like The Forsyte Saga (featuring Ioan Gruffudd naked!); or the reality shows where they make someone live in the conditions of an earlier time, the first ever being The 1900 House and my favorite being The 1940s House, which attempted to recreate the conditions of the blitz; or plain old documentaries, like Simon Schama's 15-hour History of Britain--I watched some of the episodes twice.

I've rated over 1200 movies/television programs, and I have almost 500 movies in my queue. Currently the three disks I have out are Ulysses S Grant: Warrior/President, A Very Long Engagement, and the first disk of season one of Desperate Housewives.

I think I've said enough here--but I still need to discuss what's involved in making someone your Netflix friend, so check back for an entry on that.

Posted by holly at 7:25 AM | Comments (4)

September 24, 2005

Die, Women, Die!

For a clear statement on why feminism is SO MUCH MORE than merely a political movement, check out this article in the Washington Post entitled "Female Characters, Made to Suffer for our 'Art.'"

The article makes the point that gruesome shows such CSI--or rather, imitating CSI--almost always feature crimes in which the victims are young white women, who are often not only murdered but tortured and raped. These shows are made to appeal to an audience of 18 to 34-year-old men, who don't watch much television, but the shows they do like are Desperate Housewives and CSI--as the article puts it, "we conclude, young men like their older women in teddies having sex with teenagers who cut their grass (or, in the case of Teri Hatcher, naked and in the bushes), but they like their younger women -- well, dead."

In case you're skeptical about real-life crimes against women, check out this story about hundreds of murders of Mexican women in Juarez and along the border, or this story about the systematic rape of women by the Burmese army as part of a military strategy.

Posted by holly at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Going to the Movies

In the late 1980s, I maintained subscriptions to two film series at the University of Arizona. The first met on Mondays and showed classic American films, and is where I acquired my Gary Cooper festish, after seeing Pride of the Yankees, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Morocco--especially Morocco, where he and Marlene Dietrich are just so freakin' HOT. Friday at 5:30 was the foreign film series, which is where I first saw The Seventh Seal.... I loved Max Von Sydow; I loved the chess game with death; I related to the end, where the girl is just so glad life is over. (It was not a happy time in my life.) The Friday series was also where I first encountered those bizarre movies done by Ealing Studios in the 1950s and 1960s: things like The Knack and I'm All Right Jack–-something about their resolute, eccentric Britishness made them seem more foreign than Bergman.

The art house theater in Tucson was the called the Loft, and was housed in a tiny white building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and.... Fremont, I think.... In any event, it was almost entirely swallowed by the UofA campus and has since been torn down. It had been a porno theater for a while, and well before that it was the first Mormon church in Tucson, attended by my great-grandparents and their children. I went there a lot in its art house days, and I also hit a lot of dollar theaters.

I did this partly because I really liked movies and partly because I was lonely and bored. By 1987 I was in the weird liminal state, preparing to leave the Mormon church but not yet out of it. I was too clearly dissatisfied with the church to be attractive company to many people in it, and I was too clearly obsessed with the church to be attractive company to many people outside it.

Mormons have this stupid thing about movie ratings: they're not supposed to see any R-rated movie. They can watch the most inane, offensive crap as long as it's PG (or even PG-13); furthermore, something that would earn an R rating if it was a movie is OK as long as it's in some other format--Rent, for instance, which is full of profanity and sex, is beloved by a decent number of Mormon women, and that's OK because right now it's merely a play. But its Mormon fans will be expected to relinquish their affection for it when the film version comes out November 11, slapped as it no doubt will be with an R that pushes it beyond the pale.

I never paid any attention to that. Uptight and prissy in many ways, when it came to movies, I figured a good movie was a good movie and if I had to sit through a graphic sex scene or two and hear a few swear words in order to watch a compelling story unfold, well, it was a small price to pay. I saw my first R-rated movie as a junior in high school, with my mother's permission: The Jerk, which I liked well enough. In 1984, again with my mother's approval, I took my 12-year-old brother to his first R-rated movie, The Terminator, which of course we both loved because it's a great movie.

Not only that, but at the end of my freshman year in college, in May 1982, I went to an X-rated movie, by myself. Admittedly, the X-rating has since been changed to an R, and the movie is tame by today's standards. But still, Midnight Cowboy really upset me. I just didn't know human lives could spiral so far out of control. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of Jon Voight's character, but Ratso Rizzo, the character played by Dustin Hoffmann, is not a name you soon forget. That final scene, on the bus, where JV's character realizes Ratso Rizzo is dead, and the bus driver just says, "Yeah, he's dead, but we'll have to wait til we get to Florida to do anything about it...." At least, that's how I remember it (it's been 23 years, so I might be wrong)--but whatever happened, it wasn't a happy ending, I know that much. I went home to an empty apartment--my roommates had all gone out of town--but I didn't dare go to bed, because I had somehow become afraid of the dark again. I left all the lights on and stayed awake until sunrise.

The first movie I went to see as a college freshman (I dragged my unsuspecting roommate along) was A Clockwork Orange. I lasted through the first rape scene before I turned to her and said, "Wanna go?" I later dated a guy whose favorite movie was A Clockwork Orange, and he insisted I watch it, but I think I might write about that later.... In any event, whenever I mention that one of my very favorite movies is Singin' in the Rain, and someone responds by saying something about A Clockwork Orange, I know that person is not someone I want to be close to.

I went to so many movies! I went to them. I saw amazing movies on very big screens: I saw Lawrence of Arabia on the biggest screen in Tucson, and it was a life-changing experience. But I rarely go to movies any more. The only movie I'm dying to see in a theater is the Keira Knightley-Matthew MacFadyen version of Pride and Prejudice, due out November 18. (Though I admit I don't see how it will be very good, since it's only two hours long and since, if the preview I watched online is a good indication, they added a bunch of stupid dialogue that's just not as good as what Austen herself actually wrote.) I haven't been to a movie since I saw The Aviator in Mesa with Wayne over Christmas break. I've seen dozens and dozens of movies since then, but I've watched them on dvd.

Which is another reason I need to talk about Netflix.

Posted by holly at 7:25 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

Watching Football

I guess I'm not so much "one of the boys" as I might have thought, since it turns out some of the boys have been getting together to watch football, and didn't invite me.

I found this out last week when Craig, another colleague, asked if I had been invited to SBJ's house that evening to watch football. I had not. Craig then asked, "Do you watch football?"

"If by ‘watching football' you mean, am I willing to be a in room with a television tuned to a football game, the answer is yes," I said, "as long as there's other stuff to do, like drink beer and eat, and as long as no one expects me to care about the game, and as long as there are other people who also don't care about the game, and who will ignore the game entirely whenever an interesting topic of conversation comes up." I've been to a couple of Super Bowl parties that fit that description, and they were fun. "But," I continued, "if by ‘watching football' you mean that I actually pay attention to the game, then no, I don't watch football."

I have never "watched football" in that proper sense. I have sort of tried. I had to go to all the football games in high school because my mom insisted I be in the marching band. Mom would always talk about how fun marching band was.... and when I informed her that I loathed it, loathed everything about it, from the early morning practices to the stupid formations, from the strange arrangements of pop songs marching band music so often consists of to the horrid, hot, woolen uniforms we had to put on and march around in at parades in various parts of Arizona when it was still early autumn and 90 degrees or so, all topped by the absolute horror that was Band Day at Arizona State University--hours and hours on a school bus, then hours and hours standing around in those uniforms, then more hours and hours on a school bus--well, when I complained about all that, she told me it was good for me and would build character, but I think having to do something I hated so thoroughly just contributed to my recalcitrance and cynicism, and that I would have been a nicer, happier person had I been allowed to opt out of stuff I hated and sucked at (such as playing a musical instrument, whether it was the piano, the clarinet or the bassoon) and allowed instead to devote myself more completely to stuff I liked and was good at, like editing the yearbook and getting good grades. (Yes, I was a first-class academic geek.)

Not only did I have to be in my high school marching band, but I had to watch my big sister in her stupid marching band. For a while she was in the flag corp at the University of Arizona, and a few times my parents dragged our whole family to a college football game so we could see my sister perform along with the rest of the band at half time. I begged and wheedled to get out of it, but no--I had to go. "Just bring a book," Mom said, so I did. And even though I wasn't dependent on the game for amusement, those bleachers were uncomfortable and the bathrooms were always disgusting and the action was too far away and I couldn't understand the rules and there were these long pauses where nothing happened and someone won and someone lost and I was supposed to care?

I loved football games when I lived in the dorm because everyone but me would go to them. For a good three or four hours I'd have the laundry room and then the bathroom all to myself.

There are some sports I can watch with pleasure: I like basketball, especially men's college basketball. If the Wildcats are in the playoffs, I try to watch at least one game. (Oh, the horror that was the Wildcats' loss to Illinois this past spring!) I rather enjoy the Olympics, the way they're staggered so that the winter and summer versions come along every two years; plus they're always this fascinating, strange, concentrated dose of nationalism and overachievement, all heavily edited so that you don't have to watch a lot standing around.

I'm trying to think of something else athletic I like... but I'm not coming up with much.

Friday night I hung out with SBJ and some other friends and the topic of football came up. SBJ said he was committed to spending a good chunk of the fall drinking bad beer, eating bad pizza and watching good football. He recently declared his devoted allegiance to the Patriots, and was heartened that they beat the Raiders.

The next night I ran into Tom and said, "I hear you guys watched football without me."

He said, "It didn't occur to me that you might want to come."

"It didn't occur to me either," I said, "until Craig asked me if I'd been invited, and then I had to devote a good six or seven nano-seconds to wondering if I should be hurt and offended that I wasn't given an opportunity to say no an activity I wouldn't particularly enjoy."

"You're welcome to come next time," he said.

"Thanks," I said, "but I don't think I'd have fun. SBJ told me you guys really watch."

"We really do," he said. "Especially SBJ."

I just visited the official website of the Super Bowl and learned that the New England Patriots have won three of the last four Super Bowls, which I guess makes them an easy team to get excited about. I personally will never forget the fact that on January 26, 1997, the Green Bay Packers beat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. I remember this not because I watched the game, but because while the game was going on, Adam, my evilest of exes, dumped me, brutally and thoroughly. And the next day, when I was suffering from alcohol poisoning brought on by drinking half a liter of Jack Daniels while discussing the breakup on the phone with the friend who introduced me to Adam in the first place (who sympathized strongly because he knew Adam was a schmuck but still refused to say "I told you so" until I said, "Just go ahead and say it"--only then did he say, "Well, I told you so--I mean, I really did try to warn you"), everyone kept talking about the damn football game.

So maybe if the Patriots make it to the Super Bowl this season I'll insist I get invited to the party, and bring a book in case everyone but me is watching the game, because now that I think about it, even the longest, most boring football game in the world is more fun than having my heart broken.

It so often comes back to that particular trauma, doesn't it? I hear someone say. Yeah, well, it so often does.

Posted by holly at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 5, 2005

All KINDS of Good Stuff

When I was a little girl, my favorite television program was The Carol Burnett Show. It aired on CBS from 9 to 10 p.m. on Saturday nights, and was preceded by The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show (CBS really had a way with names), which I liked but not as much as Carol Burnett. She was who I wanted to be when I grew up.

I still think one of the most inspired moments in all of television happened on that show. In a spoof of Gone with the Wind, Carol descends the stairs wearing a dress of green velvet drapes hung on a curtain rod extending beyond her shoulders. Harvey Korman, who plays the Rhett Butler character, says, "Why Scarlet, where did you find that beautiful dress?" And Carol replies, "Oh, it's just something I saw in a window."

But there have been long stretches where I watched almost no television. When I was in high school standard fare was the likes of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Love Boat and Dallas, and I had better things to do than watch that crap--even sitting in the dark in my bedroom and my head against the wall (which I did a time or two) seemed preferable to wasting my time with shows like that. In college I didn't have a television, and I never felt deprived.

Of course, there have been a few periods where I watched a lot of television. In early 1987, after I got home from my mission, I lived at home for seven and a half months before going back to finish my bachelor's degree at the University of Arizona in August. The Fox Network had just started up, and I rarely missed an episode of its finest offerings, namely The Tracey Ullmann Show and 21 Jump Street. ABC had Max Headroom, which ran for 14 episodes, and NBC had LA Law, which ran forever.

But then I went back to school and back to living without television.

Even when I finally got a television I'd forget to watch it for weeks at a time. I couldn't be bothered to remember when the few shows I liked were on; instead, I'd just turn the TV on when I felt like watching something, then run through channels until I found something interesting, which was usually MTV back in the day when it actually showed music videos.

Mostly I used my television to watch movies, especially after I moved to Iowa City, which has one of the best public libraries in the whole world. At the time, the University of Iowa's film studies program was ranked first in the nation, and the public library kept a movie collection to match. You could check out ten movies for a week for free: not just the standard new releases you'd find at a rental place, but early classics like the Irene Dunne versions of Show Boat and Love Affair.

My feelings about television changed forever when my friend Connie introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, well into the show's tenure. I went to visit her in Chicago one weekend and she said early in the afternoon, "OK, now we're going to watch Buffy," and I sighed heavily. I hate horror and slasher films (I don't like being scared, and violence for its own sake holds no appeal for me), and I thought Buffy was thoroughly in one or both of those categories. I sat in stony indignation while Connie got out a couple of VHS cassettes and turned on the VCR. After we watched the first two episodes, which establish the premise of the show, I grudgingly admitted, "OK, I can see why you like it. And it's not really scary." When she suggested later that evening that we watch a few more episodes, I offered no resistance; and the next day when she suggested we watch a few more, I agreed readily; and when those were all over and she was all out of episodes, and I said, "You mean there's really no more? You should have taped the entire series!"

I went back to my house and found I couldn't get the WB with any kind of decent reception. Cable had just become a necessity. And it remained one for several years.

And I discovered there's all KINDS of good stuff out there! I was mad about Buffy (still am) but I also found I have a particular fondness for decorating shows. I especially liked the weird ones on BBC America--Ground Force and The House Doctor and Changing Rooms. I had such a crush on designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, with his dark tousled locks, leather pants, florid blouses and French cuffs, especially after I found out he was straight (!). My other great crush was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show--but most politically progressive women I know are totally in love with him as well. I also adored So Graham Norton. Thanks to the time I spent with my three young nieces, I learned that I liked Spongebob Squarepants and The Powerpuff Girls too.

Generally I couldn't bear to simply sit there and watch television; I usually did something, preferably something productive, while I watched: quilting or knitting or ironing were favorite activities. And because I watched a lot of television, I finished a lot of quilts.

About a year ago I realized that I had reached a point where I would actually plan my afternoon around a home decorating show. No wonder I never get anything important done anymore, I thought. Not long after that, I got rid of cable.

And that's when I became serious about Netflix, which I'll discuss at some point in the future.

Posted by holly at 7:09 AM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

Without You I'm Nothing

I like to sit around my motel room after my show in my bra and panties and I’ll say to somebody, “Get me a Remy Martin and a water-back, goddamnit!” -- Sandra Bernhard, WYIN

At some point during the summer of 1990, I went to the Catalina Theater on the corner of Campbell and Grant in Tucson, Arizona, to see the film version of Sandra Bernhard’s smash one-woman show Without You I’m Nothing. I went by myself; I know people who won’t go to movies alone, but I’ve always kind of liked it, liked sitting wherever I want and being able to watch every last credit without someone saying, “Can’t we just go?”

I remember sitting in the theater, my jaw slack with wonder, my stomach clenched like a fist with envy. How does someone work up the audacity to do a performance like that? I knew I didn’t have a personality that would let me dance around on stage to “Little Red Corvette” in pasties and a sequined g-string bearing the stars and stripes, but I did decide that I wanted to use my life as the basis for my art, just like Sandra did, and that I was willing to bare almost every crevice, crack and contour of my soul.

In 1990, Sandra was best friends with Madonna, which is why she gets to deliver the great lines

And while we’re being really honest here, now that we’re not together, here’s her number. Call Madonna and f*ck the bitch! And while you’re at it, f*ck Martika!

Martika is one of those one-hit wonders who simply couldn’t go away soon enough in my book. And it was lines like that that made me write in my journal that WYIN is “full of very timely jokes and references, so I wonder if it will age well.”

A book I teach often is Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about which I have mixed feelings. I love the preface; I find it witty and engaging and I love Eggers’ defense of why he wrote the book as a memoir rather than a novel. But other parts of it are boring and annoying, and it’s not at all surprising, given his admission in the postscript, “Mistakes We Knew We Were Making,” that there are long passages he wrote hurriedly and never revised because he just wanted to get the damn thing to the publisher.

I continue to teach it because it lays out a lot of the intellectual and aesthetic issues involved in writing and reading nonfiction, and because students generally love it. One semester they were all admiration for the fact that Eggers writes about the television show American Gladiator without actually referring to the title of the program, which went right over my head, because I never once saw the show. “It’s so cool that he includes the lyrics to a Journey song!” the students enthused. “It’s so cool that someone is writing about pop culture this way and that it’s so relevant to our lives!”

I turned to study something going on outside the window so they couldn’t see me roll my eyes. When I turned back to them I said, “You think it’s going to stay relevant?”

“Of course,” one of them said. “I mean, he’s writing about stuff that’s a part of our lives. It’s not like we’re going to forget this.”

“Maybe...,” I said. “Maybe you won’t forget it, but will it mean anything to anyone else?”

“Why not?” one of them asked.

“Why don’t you just tell me if you have any idea who I’m talking about.” And I straightened my back, spoke from my diaphragm, and said:

I dedicate this song to Apollonia! To Sheila E! To Vanity! To Lisa and Wendy on their own! To all that the glamorous life implies.

I looked at them. It was a small class, only half a dozen students. All six of them were staring at me in rapt alarm. “Know who I’m talking about?” I asked. They shook their heads. “Then I’ll keep going.” And I continued:

But above all I want to dedicate this song to the purple paisley god himself, to the little man who chooses to sit all alone, naked, under a cherry moon, love sexy! It’s the sign o’ the times, it’s the sign o’ the times, it’s the sign o’ the times.

Then Andy, very tall, very talented, very smart, and the front man for a band, said, “Oh, uh, Prince. It’s Prince.”

And I explained that yes, the whole riff was about Prince; the list of women were his musical proteges and in a few cases his lovers. But none of them shone much in her own right, as any brilliance they might have possessed (and I’m not sure Sheila E had much to begin with) was eclipsed by the glory his astonishing genius.

“Those references were current in 1989 or ‘90,” I said. Only fifteen years and they’re almost incomprehensible.” I picked up my copy of AHWOSG. “Because this is print, I’ll bet it ages twice as well--I bet it’ll be 30 years instead of 15 before it’s thoroughly dated.”

They didn’t want to believe that something truly inspired and relevant could become so dated so fast. So to prove it, I brought in my VHS copy of WYIN (a gift from my friend Wayne) and showed it to them.

When I mention this to colleagues, they are often shocked. “You didn’t!” said a colleague who shows some pretty outrageous movies himself. But like I said, it was a small class and I also prepped the students repeatedly, told them that there was nudity and a graphic (although brief) sex scene and that it was weird and they’d be annoyed and they had to give me their permission to show it to them and not report me for subjecting them to indecency--but hey, it meant classtime would be devoted to a movie instead of a discussion, so of course they said yes.

The movie ran a little longer than 75 minutes allotted for class, so I didn't ask for comments until the next class meeting, two days later. One of the students was planning to go to graduate school in film studies. Even though 48 hours had passed since he'd seen the movie, he said, “I’m not ready to talk about that movie. I still don’t know what I think about it.” The other students had even less to say.

Without You I’m Nothing was released on dvd on Tuesday, August 23, 2005, so if you haven’t seen it, put it at the top of your Netflix queue! You may or may not get a lot of the references, but even still, there’s just so much going on in that movie. And if you have seen it, please leave a comment telling me about one of your favorite scenes.

And don’t forget:

If you should wake up one long, lonely night and feel that you’re all alone, remember: YOU ARE.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)