Category Archives: Film

The year of women living dangerously (in movies)

Americana, Film, Psychological Musings

Trainwreck

The game is a men’s game, all the rules are made by men, the feminine is not honored. A remembered, probably badly, quote from Coco Gonzo after seeing Mad Max: Fury Road (in 3D).

Michele and I saw Pixar’s Inside Out  last weekend. It was one of those children’s movies that are as much fun for an adult as for the intended audience. I thought it was excellent and, unusual for Pixar, the protagonist was female (for only the second time, the first being Princess Merida of Scotland in Brave, a movie I didn’t see). I say that the protagonist was female, but she – her name was Riley – could have just as easily been a boy. Her favorite sport was ice hockey and I’m not sure if there was anything particularly feminine about her.

A day before Inside Out, we saw  Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck. If you don’t know Amy Schumer, she is that girl from the television that talks about her pussy all the time – to quote from the opening sequence of the first video below – and she is pushing the limits of comedy and what is sayable in public (BTW, isn’t all  good humor pushing what is acceptable?) The two clips below are pretty typical of what she does and, if you haven’t seen her, these are a good place to start.

 

Trainwreck , is both a parody of a rom-com and an homage. It is also a string of joke set-ups that don’t always go together, but it is very funny. Amy plays the role of a womanizing heavy drinker, commitment-phobic and profane; it is the kind of role that would have been the man’s part five years ago (the body language in the picture on top of the post is a good demonstration). Bill Hader plays what would have been the woman’s part with LeBron James playing her best friend.

A couple of months ago, we saw Melissa McCarthy transmogrify from the Penny Moneyworth part to the James Bond part in Spy and before that it was Charlize Theron being the toughest sonofabitch around in Mad Max Fury Road.

Months ago, over dinner after Mad Max Fury Road, several of us got into a discussion over what makes a feminist movie and if Mad Max Fury Road was one (Mad Max and the other three movies pass the Bechdel test, BTW, if that was a question).  I think Mad Max is a feminist movie, but there was alot of disagreement and I am not as sure as I once was. Charlize Theron is the hero as well as the instigating agent in the movie but much of what she does is a woman acting as a man rather than through the feminine.

The operative words above is much, as opposed to all. Throughout the movie Theron is acting out of empathy for the Brides and she brings a humility and vulnerability that we don’t usually see from a man. When she talks about redemption, we sense it is because she almost lost her soul to become Imperator Furiosa. And Melissa McCarthy isn’t all testosteron either, she is reticent to step forward, a woman who has accepted her station. When she becomes the macha spy, she is still a team player, and – in the end – she shares the glory. In Trainwreck, Amy Schumer is only playing the man’s part in public, at home she is a softer, more feminine, Amy.

These four movies have got me thinking about women in a man’s world. When I say man’s world, I really mean the western, public, world in which the rules are men’s rules and the women have to conform. Both politics and business are basically run by men’s rules. They are combative, hierarchical, the rules are stable, and the main concern is for short-term gain. Women like Diane Feinstein do well because they, essentially, act like men.

What we need, it seems to me, are more feminine institutions (if that isn’t an oxymoron). Modern corporations measure success in how much they contribute to the top officers and big shareholders –  not in how much they contribute to the collective – and that takes perpetual and unsustainable  growth. What we really need today is a model for sustainability and that will require women engendering their feminine characteristics like coöperation and inclusiveness and long-term thinking.

 

 

Thinking about the water we swim in while listening to Tina and Amy joke at the Golden Globes

Americana, Art, Film
Jelly Fish at Monterey Bay Aquarium-
Jelly Fish at Monterey Bay Aquarium

After a day of football playoffs, mostly droning in the background as we did other things, Michele and I sat down to watch the Golden Globe Awards. I love the Golden Globe Awards and I love the Academy Awards, both for the same reasons, the meritocracy of the awards. This year’s Golden Globes, however, seemed to be especially interested in diversity which made it even more interesting to watch. Selma did not do as well as I had hoped but it is hard to argue against Boyhood.

For me, the best part of the show was Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. For the third year in a row, they managed to make fun of the people they were there to honor and still honor them. I guess they will be not be back next year and I miss them already.

I especially liked their Bill Cosby rape riff. Cosby is a showbiz icon and, to go after him like Tina and Amy did, in a bit about Into the Woods, takes nerve. The kind of nerve that only great comics have.

Another distinctly pertinent bit was at George Clooney’s expense – and by extension, most of the people there. George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human-rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected of a three-person U.N. commission regarding rules-of-war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award. 

This joke seemed even more pertinent when I read the New York Times reporting of it this morning. As he accepted his award, Mr. Clooney joked about celebrities using the night as a chance to apologize for all the “snarky” things they said about one another in hacked Sony emails, but he too turned serious when talking about his new wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, saying that it was “humbling” to be in love at last and that he was proud to be her husband. She wore a Dior haute couture sheath...

That’s it, the New York Times didn’t tell us what George Clooney wore but, for some reason they thought it was of major importance when describing Amal Alamuddin. Our culture, if the New York Times is any indication, has a long way to go before it catches up with Amy and Tina.

Gone Girl by The Brothers Grimm

Film

Marriage-76

Michele and I saw Gone Girl over the weekend and we were both surprised that the theater was so full (we had lousy seats because we misguidedly got there pretty late thinking the theater would be empty by now). Often, after Michele and I have seen a movie, we will talk about it on the way home and then, when we get home, read various reviews and explanations in a way of continuing the experience. Sometimes I like a movie better than my favorite reviewers, sometimes less – and occasionally much more or much less – but the reviews almost always point out something I missed.

In Gone Girl’s case, we both felt that the movie didn’t hold together, that there were just too many parts that didn’t quite fit. Too many bits in which, on the way home, Michele or I would say Wait a minute, why….? (But that was on the way home, not sitting in the movie theater, there we were both swept up in the drama.) Thinking about the movie in the comfort of our marital home, reading reviews – especially a review and an article in The New Yorker – it became obvious pretty quickly that this was meant to be a modern Fairy Tale, an allegory if you prefer –  every bit as gruesome as The Grim Brothers.

This is not a movie about Nick and Amy Dunne’s marriage, this is a movie about Marriage. The unappreciated sacrifices, the built up annoyances that becomes resentments, the disappointments that don’t get addressed, that is part of every marriage. Like all marriages – OK, most marriages – it starts off as the Dream Marriage based on projected fantasies and impossible standards and deteriorates into a power struggle. A power struggle in which the wife is as smart as the husband – maybe smarter – and the husband is as emotional – maybe more emotional – as the wife. Like any marriage, we can take sides but it is hard to think that either side has a monopoly on evil (or virtue).

As Joe Bob used to say Check it out (if you are one of the few people who haven’t seen it already or read the book).

Watching the Golden Globes, thinking about the ads

Film

Globes Winners 2014Watching the Golden Globes last night, with all the glittering stars, what I most remember is the Bing Ad. For some reason, I have decided that am a Google guy and Microsoft, in general, sort of bugs me. Maybe it is because, when they ruled the world, Microsoft quit innovating. Maybe it is because they were never an innovator to start with, just a company built around making money off of other people’s ideas.

There were so many good movies this year that I wasn’t particularly rooting for anybody. I had my favorites, but it is impossible to argue that the winner weren’t terrific. I haven’t seen The Wolf of Wall Street and have no idea if Leonardo DiCaprio should have won for best actor, but both 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle both winning for best picture, was great. Woody Allen got an award he deserved and didn’t ruin it by showing up, and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were funny for the second year in a row. But all that is a blur the next morning and I still remember the Bing Ad and the Apple Ad. They are both well worth watching.

Seeing “her” @ the end of the year

Film

X-mas-

I feel like I have been away for weeks but it is really only been a greatly extended Christmas (away being defined as not making a blog post). Christmas is a get-together-with-friends-and-family day and — it would seem by the movie openings — a Go-to-a-movie Day. One of the things my sister, Paula, and I share is a love for movies, not always the same movies, but pretty close. So one of the things we did while she was here, for a couple of days, after she had Christmas in San Diego, was go to see her. It was our Christmas Celebration together (one of my most memorable Thanksgivings with Paula was seeing Paris is Burning at the Guild in Albuquerque).

I went in to her thinking it would be good and walked out thinking that it is the best movie I have seen this year. her is soft, gently surreal, and visually stunning.  It is, maybe, the best relationship movie since Annie Hall.

I don’t know why I should have been so surprised, it is a Spike Jonze movie, after all. The same Spike Jonze that gave us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., but Charlie Kaufman, the writer of those movies, got most of the credit rather than Jonez. Part of my problem is that  Jonze played the dumb, goofball, Conrad Vig in David Russell’s Three Kings and I still haven’t been able to shake that image even though it has been 14 years now. However, Spike Jonze both wrote and directed her and he is – finally – getting the credit.

The movie takes place in a past-future Los Angeles. What I mean by past-future, is that it seems more like a future imagined in the 60’s rather than imagined today. It is not the Blade Runner future or the Elysium future, it is the 2001 future with a very nice  HAL 9000 that is the OS in a wood and brass thingy that Joaquin Phoenix, as Theodor, carries like a cell phone (although nobody seems to use them as phones). Theodor is listlessly going through life in a limbo period after his wife left him and filed for divorce, but before signing the papers that finalize it. Scarlett Johansson is her – Samantha, the nice HAL 9000 is OS1 – and the perfect, custom-made for him, girlfriend with whom Theodor falls in love.

Amy Adams is also in the movie, as Amy, and is Theodor’s best friend. She is so soft and best friendish that she doesn’t seem like the same actor that played Sydney Prosser in American Hustle. She doesn’t even seem like she is the same height or age. I think that Amy Adams does not get the acting credit she should. Meryl Streep played the good Julia in Julie & Julia and got great reviews while Amy Adams played the bad Julie and got pretty much ignored. I think Julie was the harder part, the less likable part, played better.

Back at her, the conceit of the movie is that the love is played straight by everybody in the movie. My sister was creeped out by that but I got sucked in (although I felt a little bit of the kind of edginess I get when I watch somebody driving – in a movie – and they look away from the road for a time I consider to be too long). her was a great way to end a year of watching movies. It seemed to me to be mostly a mediocre year that ended with a burst of fantastic movies. It started with Side Effects which I really liked, wandered down into the forgettable Star Treck into Darkness and Pacific Rim– although This is the End was a super summer movie – and then came back with Gravity, American Hustle, and her.