I suppose as a blogger who regularly dispenses unsolicited opinions about female issues in film media, the premiere of the Sex and the City movie means I have to do this.
In one of my last semesters of college, I lived in a house with about ten other young women. In our living room, there was a communal DVD set of several seasons of Sex and the City. On any given evening, you could generally find at least one house resident watching them, which usually attracted others. This is how I first encountered the show - in the center of a circle of other young women working out their lives and identities. We loved the characters' friendship, mistakes, and freedom. We aspired to it. And their stories became our own mythology. What woman of our age with even a passing familiarity with SATC hasn't found herself thinking at some occasion in her life: "This is just like what happened to Carrie."
Years later, though, I see this show in a much different light. What I notice now is the rampant materialism, the borderline neurotic navel-gazing, and the way that, for all the characters' independence, they still end up conforming to established cultural norms for women revolving around monogamy, marriage, and motherhood. There is a lot of discussion in the show about women's roles, and each character breaks the mold in her own little ways. But, as the show progressed, and as the movie reviews pour in, it seems apparent that the saga is more talk about redefining women's roles than demonstrated action about it.
There is nothing really wrong with this, as it is. But, due to those little mold-breaking ways, SATC has a reputation as a feminist influence. In terms of feminism, I think it does more damage than it does good. It paints a pretty picture, but does little to challenge the underlying social structure that feminism questions. The sexually-liberated career women are still variously fixated on marriage, maxing out credit cards, and, frankly, themselves. It's similar to the storm that recently broke out in the feminist blogosphere about the dismissal of minority feminists by leading, more privileged, white feminists. Whoever thinks SATC is feminist, needs to seriously expand her understanding of the battles feminism is up against. And it's exactly this insular quality that keeps the show from being anything but a lip-service fantasy.
I don't have a particular objection to Manolos, or to marriage. But I do have an objection to these things touted as the only expected or possible end of women's stories. SATC has fetishized a fantastic lifestyle that moves comfortably within the establishment. It's entertaining. It's worthwhile. But it's not feminist.
And, most importantly to me, it's not the type of women's stories I want to see from Hollywood. There are a lot of women filmmakers out there working way too hard to get serious, female-focused dramas on screen in an environment mostly open to only romantic and/or quirky comedies and period pieces. SATC: The Movie is going to bring women to the theaters in droves. But it's also going to give Hollywood the message that all women audiences are worth is more froth, more fluff, and less feminism. And it will do nothing to gain more respect for female-focused movies from male audiences, which is something women filmmakers absolutely have to do in order to move forward.
I'll probably watch this film, much farther down the road. But I'm already disappointed - and hopeful that the next generation of women gets a better set of stories to use as their own mythological touchstone.
The fact that these movies [non-traditional female-led films] have been hits, while films like The Holiday, Music and Lyrics, and 27 Dresses have failed to reap huge profits, should be a wakeup call to producers. These high-budget flops all feature white, ultra-skinny heroines prancing against the backdrop of suburban mansions or windowed penthouses. I know they take place in cities, or towns, but I'm not sure which ones. The heroines dress fabulously and have nary a wrinkle, or an accent of any kind, and usually lack back-stories or families - or even much personality besides a frenetic cutesiness. And even when they do feature unusual characters, they ignore them.
It's definitely time to define "movies interesting to women" as something else than the bland, formulaic and privileged territory currently allotted to the chick flick genre.
The 25-Annual 24-Hour Ohio SciFi Marathon is set and ready to go for 19-20 April at the Drexel in Bexley. You can get the schedule at their site, plus the intriguing news that The Day the Earth Stood Still star (and The Fountainhead and other classic films), Patricia Neal, will be attending.
This is a deliberately unconventional pick. Orson Welles directed many other films that fit better into the noir canon - The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, and the film noir to end all films noir (literally), Touch of Evil - but The Trial is a newfound favorite of mine.
I'm not going go into too much detail with it, because discussing enough details to give the movie justice would quickly expand this post into book-length. But The Trial is a cinematic adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel, turned by Welles into a sharply stylistic, brutally beautiful dream of oppression and death. In a very loose sense, it's very noir-like in its themes (complete with some mysteriously dangerous dames). It's almost a meta-noir. It's also essential for any noir fan to watch, if only to compare to the other, more conventional offerings.
Pixar has finally seemed to answer the question of when we're going to see a Pixar film with a female main character with the announcement of their upcoming slate of movies and the planned 2011 release of The Bear and the Bow, an action/adventure retelling of a Scottish tale of a rebellious heroine. It also boasts a female director and producer. I have high hopes for this one, but since it sounds like a different route for Pixar to take, we'll have to see. The rest of the forthcoming Disney/Pixar films (barring the unfortunate "Fairies" DVD series, which looks like sparkly little girl bait and nothing more) also look pretty great.
I've mentioned the other MST3K alumni's RiffTrax project in the past, but I don't think the topic of Cinematic Titanic has come up yet - which is clearly a horrible oversight, because it looks like a lot of fun:
I thought it was kind of silly when, a few years ago, Spike Lee tried to sue Spike TV over their name (although, occasionally, I'd like to punish them as well for forcing me to sit through commercials for the Ultimate Fighters Reality Show when I just want to catch the odd episode of Star Trek: Voyager, but that's another issue). However, I'm pleased to know that, in general, he's fighting more important battles. For instance, when he recently received Chrysler's sixth annual Behind the Lens award, he politely thanked them all - and then let loose a torrent of accusations about the lack of diversity in the film industry and the difficulty of getting worthwhile film financed:
He started with financing difficulties for indie films. "I took my ass on a plane to Europe and got the financing for this film," Lee said of his latest joint, the World War II drama "Miracle of St. Anna." "So, as Malcolm (X) said, the struggle is far from over."
And:
Lee continued on what he called his "little tirade," addressing the African-American industryites in the audience and telling them it didn't matter what kind of car they drove or how big their houses are, "we're way behind in film."
The author of the article keeps framing Lee's quotes as "jokes" and "quips," but I don't think he was joking. If an established and honored director such as Lee can't even get films financed, what are chances of currently unknown minority directors doing the same?
Wow, if there ever were a piece to be featured here on my blog, this one from io9 is it: Bio-Art Is Not a Crime, an interview with director Lynn Hershman Leeson about her new film, Strange Culture, her old films (all with heavy doses of technology and art exploration), the role of women in technological innovation, and the challenges of female filmmakers. It's all my favorite discussion topics rolled up into one.
I have yet to become familiar with much of her work: Lynn's first film, 1997's Conceiving Ada, has been on my list to see for a long time, but tracking down a copy wasn't easy (finally have it in my GreenCine queue). But it's a scientific time-travel story involving Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter, and the first computer programmer) and actress Tilda Swinton, so I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it. Time to bump it up in the queue, I think.
Movies are not supposed to be pills that you take to feel better. They're not travelling carnivals with elephants and jugglers. They're supposed to be aesthetic journeys and emotional hikes that get us in touch with things that too many of us tend to push away (or anesthetize ourselves from) in our day to day. They're supposed to be compressions and condensations that create indelible moments, insights and excavations into our collective soul.
After the trailer for the upcoming 3-D movie version of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, one of my favorite books, was leaked to the internet, the studio went ahead and released their own, higher-quality one. I have some trepidation about seeing a book I love through another's perspective, which I generally have with all movies adapted from books - but, beyond that, I'm excited to see this.
Her films have divided Iran, led to her arrest and seen her charged with four crimes that carry the death penalty. But Iranian filmmaker Tehmineh Milani refuses to be silenced.
"She focuses on women's rights and shows things the way they are", states a fan. Milani's latest film, 'Payback', is her most contentious to date. It's about four women who meet in prison and form a vigilante gang, posing as prostitutes and handing out their own brand of justice to men. "I wrote the story but the characters are based on real people", Milani states. Although Milani is Iran's most commercially successful director, filmmaking for her is about much more than making money. As she explains: "I think I have an ability to make a positive cultural change."
And for a bit of commentary - a woman is the most commercially successful film director in Iran and yet we have still to get one American female director even remotely on par with Spielberg or even Tarantino? What the hell is going on?
I had forgotten I had even done this, but apparently last November I entered GreenCine's Joy Division/Control contest, which celebrated the release of the Ian Curtis biopic Control with a prize of the new 2-disc collector's CD set of Joy Division's Closer. And I won it. There's no particular reason for me to even mention this, except for the facts that A) it's cool to win stuff, and B) GreenCine is pretty cool for giving it to me. Go show them some love.
Since this is an off week for Noir Monday, you can fulfill all of your noir blogging needs over at Noir of the Week, which has posted over the last two weeks the one-two punch of arguably the two best noirs ever: Sunset Blvd. and Double Indemnity.
In 1933 an accessible synopsis of the Payne Fund Studies by journalist Henry James Forman was published under the bracing title Our Movie Made Children. The project marshaled the full weight of lab-coated social science to confirm the gut-level suspicion that the movies burrowed like termites into impressionable juvenile minds: girls took to rouge and tobacco, boys to back talk and violence, and all to disrespect and deviance.
This is a fantastic article, and raises questions of the code's existing Hollywood legacy. The motion picture industry still does operate under a ratings systems that influences both film production and distribution, and that system still likes to tell us that our youth is lost if they see an actor on screen smoking, or playing a gay character. I hope someday these "threats" will seem as quaint as the ones posed by girls using rouge seem to us now.
I don't like the MPAA. I may have mentioned it before. And instances like this are why:
The MPAA's "University Toolkit" (a piece of monitoring software that universities are being asked to install on their networks to spy on students' communications) has been taken down, due to copyright violations. [Via BB.]
Putting aside the whole questionable ethics about producing spyware, we're reminded yet again that the MPAA isn't really concerned about copyright. They're concerned about money. Money for them. Period. This isn't even the first time they've ripped off someone's software. If they were truly the copyright crusaders they make themselves out to be, you would think they would put a bit more effort into upholding those standards when it comes to others' copyrights (and resulting money). In reality, the MPAA is a hypocritical, corrupt organization that inexplicably has an unfair stranglehold on the practices of American film distribution.
There's an interesting point/counterpoint discussion at the Fword about Quentin Tarantino and his views on women. I think they're both right. I think that Tarantino does have issues with women, and that his female characters end up more exploitive than empowering. But I also agree that feminists don't have to view every single film (or piece of art or music) through the narrow lens of being "good for women" only. There are a lot of artists whom I admire in spite of their misogynist tendencies, intended or otherwise.
Tarantino, however, I also object to on cinematic grounds. In fact, he's been one of my favorite film blogging whipping boys. I think his treatment of women in his films springs from the same distance from reality and indulgent immersion in his own fantastical world that drags down the films themselves.
(As a side note, I realize that same type of argument could be used against my other boy, Wes Anderson. Why do I generally let him get away with it and not Quentin? Don't know. If nothing else, I think Anderson's fantasies are much less derivative than Tarantino's. The rest, I suppose, is a mystery.)
This week's IFC News podcast is an especially good one - discussing the increasing use of motion capture technology in film versus traditional animation. Of course, it's inspired by the premiere of Beowulf, which, despite Neil Gaiman's writerly involvement, I have next to no desire to see. I'm all for employing new technologies, and computer animation can be wonderful (proved by Pixar) - but I think there's a line where it stops being creative and ends up being only convenient. Matt and Alison talk about all the pros and cons in the podcast.
A welcome antidote to the dominant society's soulless spectacle of the female sex object glamour girl gladiators scrutinized so brutally in the feature film Little Miss Sunshine, Miss Navajo has much to enlighten and convey to American women about self-respect, gender consciousness, honoring historical memory, and collective unity versus ruthless competition.
Of course this type of event has special significance for Navajo women, but it's not a bad point to make that other American women could benefit from such a model in their own lives.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a quote by Joss Whedon, from a recently posted article called "Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death." The incident that inspired the article was the 7 April murder of seventeen-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad, who was stoned to death. What made her death so notable was the fact that it was recorded by a camera phone and uploaded to the internet. Not only can you find still images of the attack, but video. You can literally watch a girl get beaten to death, from the point of view of someone standing amidst the crowd that killed her.
Honor killings are a huge challenge to human rights, and, because they generally (although not exclusively) target women, they are also often a special cause of women's rights movements. But Whedon's piece is not just about honor killings. To him, the phenomenon of digitally recording a woman's murder and sharing it across the internet for everyone to see is inextricably tied to a current Hollywood trend - that of extreme horror movies, such as Captivity and Hostel: Part II - movies that have been labeled "torture porn" for their almost fetishistic concentration on gore for gore's sake.
Whedon goes much farther into a panic of real-life misogyny (he's right, for all intents and purposes, but the issues he raises are too complex to address fairly in a single website post), but I'm branching off the discussion into a consideration of the connection between filmed fictional violence and filmed violence in reality. It's a question at the very least worth asking. What exactly is the difference between our desire to see girls on movie screens mutilated, tortured and killed, and the desire of those swapping footage of a girl being kicked, stoned, and beat to bloody death in a public street? Is there one? And if there is, is it smaller than it should be?
I have never been a fan of extreme horror films. The first I saw is, well, Saw. It's probably the most credible of the genre, but I still found it both trite and disgusting. I am, however, a long-time fan of horror, both print and screen, in general, and I don't have a problem with gore and explicit violence within the course of a worthwhile story. Or even with an artistic twist. I can appreciate Dario Argento and George Romero. Surprisingly (and to no one more than me), I can even handle some Rob Zombie. I didn't expect his film work to have the creativity and perspective it does.
That last, though, might just be my impression, considering that Zombie is an outspoken defender of extreme horror movies. In a recent NPR piece, he described the genre as harmless "escapism." Maybe so. But is this the best world to which we can offer an escape? One of senseless violence and death? And what precisely are we escaping? The drudgery of our daily lives, as Zombie suggests - or, as others suggest, the distant terror of war, persecution, and tragedy that already inhabits our collective unconscious? If that latter is the case, experiencing fictional violence can help make the real violence more distant and less important. Which can make us feel superficially better, but doesn't do much to solve the real problems, either in besieged foreign lands or within our restless minds.
Where is the line drawn, anyway? What makes a horror movie cross into "extreme" territory? I don't think it's just the equation of how much violence it contains. I think the difference between good horror and torture porn, between cinematic violence and real violence is very simple: context. Real violence is so shockingly horrendous because of the context in which it was done - which is, namely, reality. Fake violence gets a pass because it's not real and thus doesn't really matter. But what about distinctions within the realm of fake violence? Is there ever a point where it becomes just as reprehensible as real violence? Definitely. It happens when the context in which the violence is placed - artistic context, historical context, even a decidedly escapist context - becomes less context and more backdrop, or just an excuse for the violence. When that happens, essentially the same dynamics are working as are during instances of real violence. In both cases, the end is violence that fulfills a base human need, and it has no higher purpose than that - or a morally supportable purpose at all.
Of course, I've readily admitted I've personally seen very few of the entries in the torture porn genre, so it's possible my opinions are off the mark when it comes to the individual films. However, I also couldn't bring myself to view the online video of Du’a Khalil Aswad, struggling, screaming, and ultimately dying at the hands of a vicious mob. If it's the same impulse that keeps me from both, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
Some other discussions on the merit (or lack thereof) of extreme horror, inspired mostly by the release of Hostel II:
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a quote by Joss Whedon, from a